Beyond Alexanderplatz

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ENGLISH – TWO ASTONISHING FICTIONAL WORLDS FROM WEIMAR GERMANY

MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS (A Dystopia of the 27th Century)

and

MANAS (A Himalayan Epic in Verse)

Translated and introduced by C.D. Godwin April 2020

www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com

CONTENTS

1. Why this Introduction? 1

2. Döblin’s life and works 2.1 Alfred Döblin 1878-1957 2 2.2 Döblin’s epic fictions 3 2.3 ‘Happy 140th, Alfred Döblin!’ 4

3. Mountains Oceans Giants [MOG] (1924) 3.1 Alfred Döblin (1941): MOG as a Hollywood film 6 3.2 Gabriele Sander (2013): ‘Afterword’ 13 3.3 Alfred Döblin (1924): ‘Remarks on MOG’ 25 3.4 K. Müller-Salget (1988): Excerpts from Alfred Döblin: Werk and Entwicklung 31 3.5 C.D. Godwin (2019): Why I decided to abridge the English translation 37

4. Manas- a Himalayan Epic (1926) 4.1 C.D. Godwin: The vanished masterpiece 39 4.2 Heinz Graber (1972): On the style of Manas 41 4.2 Four Reviews of Manas – a) Robert Musil (1927) 51 b) Oskar Loerke (1928) 55 c) Axel Eggebrecht (1927) 57 d) W.von Einsiedl (1928) 58

WHY THIS INTRODUCTION?

Since his death in 1957, Alfred Döblin’s reputation has grown as one of the 20th century’s great German-language Modernists. A stream of dissertations, monographs reviews and biographies has familiarised German literary journalists and readers with Döblin and his oeuvre, and encouraged the publication of smart new editions (currently the well-curated series from Fischer Klassik). Elsewhere in the world Döblin remains obscure. If known, it is usually for just one title from his vast and varied output: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Of the few discussions of Döblin in English, mostly tucked away in obscure scholarly journals, little has reached the wider community of readers. Since Döblin is not ‘in the air’ in the Anglophone world, his name is hardly known, and his books are almost entirely unknown. Hence an ill- founded presumption that he can safely be ignored, even by sophisticated readers So it was a bold move by Galileo Publishing to acquire the English-language rights two startlingly original epic fictions by Döblin: the sprawling futuristic dystopia Mountains Oceans Giants, and the (gasp!) epic-in-verse Manas. Especially the latter: this wonderful work has, inexplicably, attracted minimal critical attention even in Germany. So, a rare chance for the Anglophone literary world to reveal long-lost treasure! This pamphlet has two tasks – * whet the reader’s appetite: What delights (and challenges) do these books offer? * highlight current German views: Why and how should Döblin be taken seriously?

Our evidence:

Alfred Döblin’s 1941 pitch to MGM for a film of Mountains Oceans Giants provides a handy overview of the plot structure. His 1924 ‘Remarks on MOG’, made soon after the novel first appeared, explain his motivations and seek to justify controversial issues in its composition. Gabriele Sanders has edited numerous works of German literature. She wrote the only book- length monograph on MOG. Her ‘Afterword’ to the current (2013) German edition highlights the novel’s strengths and weaknesses, the enduring relevance of its themes, and the lively attention it continues to receive from German critics and scholars. Klaus Müller-Salget’s informed and fair-minded discussion of Döblin’s work and development sets the dystopian novel in the context of Döblin’s evolving philosophy of life. Heinz Graber’s 1967 monograph on Manas remains the only substantial critique of this epic. C.D. Godwin’s translation of Döblin’s earliest epic fiction, The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, was first published some 30 years ago (2nd edition from NY Review Books 2015). He has translated five Döblin epics so far, as well as numerous essays. His website focuses on the lives and works of Döblin and contemporaries: www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com.

1

ALFRED DÖBLIN 1878-1957

Alfred Döblin was born in Stettin (Pomerania) to a family of assimilated Jews. When Alfred was 10 years old his father, who ran a large-scale tailoring business, absconded to America with a young employee. The family had to move to Berlin, where they depended on not always charitable relatives. Döblin relished the big-city environment, but detested the philistine and militaristic Wilhelmine society. He studied Medicine, qualifying as a doctor with a dissertation on memory loss and fabulation in patients with Korsakov Syndrome. At university he also attended classes in Philosophy. For three decades, until he had to flee into exile in 1933, he regarded Medicine as his primary profession, even as his output of novels, stories, essays, plays, theatre reviews and public lectures grew massively. In 1926 he became a founding member of the Literature Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences, alongside Gerhard Hauptmann, Thomas Mann and other leading writers. Although his reputation as a writer grew steadily during the 1920s, he gained widespread public recognition only in 1929 with his big-city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Unfortunately that novel has ever since overshadowed his other substantial contributions to literature. In 1933 he fled from the Nazis first to Zurich, and then to Paris where in 1936 he acquired French citizenship. In 1940 the family had to flee again before the German invasion, ending up in Hollywood until 1945. During a one-year contract with MGM he worked on Random Harvest and Mrs Miniver among other projects, but none of his contributions made it to final editing – sadly, since he had enthusiastically adopted cinematic techniques in his writing since at least Wang Lun (1915). While in Hollywood, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Alfred Döblin returned to Germany in 1945 in the uniform of a French officer, with oversight over cultural affairs in the French zone of occupation. His defeated countrymen showed little interest in revisiting his pre-war writings, or in his current views, and he returned to France in 1953. He died in 1957. Since the 1980s, Döblin has increasingly been recognised in Germany as a major but unjustly neglected figure in 20th century European literature, with a stream of critical reviews, scholarly monographs, and well-curated new editions of his works.

2

DÖBLIN’S MAJOR FICTIONS

The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915). Set in 18th century China; remarkably avoids almost all trace of Western attitudes and perspectives. In English: 2nd ed., NY Review Books 2015.

Wallenstein (1920). Set in the first half of the Thirty Years War (1618-48). Described by one critic as “A magnificent wall-painting by a very near-sighted artist”. Translation, as yet unpublished, at www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com .

Mountains Oceans Giants (1924): Dystopia set mainly in the 27th century.

Manas (1927). A Himalayan epic in verse, blending Existentialism and Hinduism.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). Big-city epic, the only Döblin work at all widely known. New translation by Michael Hofmann: NY Review Books /Penguin Books 2018.

Babylonische Wandrung (‘Babylonian Exile’ 1934): the first work written mainly in exile; a picaresque account of Babylonian god Marduk’s progress through 1930s Europe.

Land without Death (‘Amazonas Trilogy’ 1937-38): vividly depicts 500 years of Europe’s impact on South America, exposing Eurocentric barbarism’s deep roots.

Translation, as yet unpublished, at www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com .

November 1918 (1948-49). A massive novel of the upheavals in Germany at the end of the First World War. Translated by John E Woods: Fromm 1983.

Tales of a Long Night (1956). Döblin’s last major work. A wounded soldier returns from World War 2 to a dysfunctional family. Translated by R & R Kimber: Fromm 1984.

3

HAPPY 140TH, DOCTOR DÖBLIN! You were born 140 years ago, on 10 August 1878, just a few years after the founding of the German Empire – the first unitary German nation-state. Who could foresee how that world-political event would work out, and affect your next seven decades? A hundred years ago, in August 1918, amid the barbarous misery of the First World War, you were deep in the writing of your second great epic novel: Wallenstein, which would bring to vivid life the follies and barbarism of the Thirty Years War three centuries earlier. How little had humankind learned! Ninety years ago, in 1928, you were admitted into the Literature section of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, alongside Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Oscar Loerke, and other literary luminaries of Left and Right. This was a year before your one best-selling international success: Berlin Alexanderplatz, which ever since has overshadowed all your other works. (But Wang Lun, Wallenstein, the Dystopian Mountains Oceans Giants, the wonderful neglected Manas, not to mention your political polemics and reflections on the writer’s craft, were more than enough to justify your admission to the Parnassian heights of the Academy.) Eighty years ago, in exile in Paris in 1938, you had just published your South American epics, now known under the covering title Amazonas. Deprived by tyranny of almost all your German-reading base, you nevertheless persevered to provide an engrossing work of historical fiction which is also a thought-provoking critique of what Europe has wrought on the world over half a millennium. Fifty years ago, in 1968, a decade after you left this earth, the first uniform edition of your works was well advanced under the editorship of Walter Muschg. (Not all of Muschg’s editorial decisions have fared well in the eyes of later scholarship.) Thirty years ago, by 1988, serious scholars in Germany were coming to grips with your extensive oeuvre, for example collecting your many scattered essays and journalistic pieces, and writing sometimes controversial overviews. (On a personal note, 1988 is the year I discovered Wang Lun, and decided to try my hand at translating it.) This year, 2018, your 140th anniversary, has seen a new English translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the launch of this website, dedicated to bringing your other works to the attention of the English-reading world. Dear Doctor Döblin: the Muse (or Demon, or celestial Power) that drove you to devote such extraordinary energy and imagination to the creation of word-worlds never had as its first aim the accumulation of ‘fame’ and ‘fortune’. But it did at least need attentive readers. Your works, it is true, make demands on the reader (especially in this new age of the ‘instant message’), yet their reward is correspondingly great; for those word- worlds, once experienced, revolve and orbit for evermore in the imaginations of those who encounter them. Be assured, Doctor Döblin, that you are not forgotten! Posted at www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com on 10/08/2018

4

INTRODUCING DÖBLIN’S DYSTOPIA –

MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS (1924)

5

THE THAWING OF GREENLAND Pitching Mountains Oceans Giants as a Hollywood film Alfred Döblin (1941)1

Part 1 (Prelude) Technological advances and discoveries together with their dissemination by industry bring about ever more change in the situation of humanity in America and Europe. Political power slides ever more away from the actual politicians. It is taken over by representatives of technology, science and industry. In place of the old politically distinct states of America and Europe, a World Empire arises with two centres: New York, London. Their Senates are composed of representatives of technology, science and industry. In place of the earlier problem of unemployment, the economy and society of the World Empire are beset ever more by the problem of how the masses, who no longer need to work, should be kept occupied. We experience the first pushback against developments. This provokes the Senates, who are protectors of Progress, to secure their power. Technology and scientific advances must also be protected from misuse. So the study of technology and science becomes ever more secretive, accessible only to a chosen few. The elites also feel compelled to ration the spread of Progress. The 26th century brings the decisive turning point: Synthetic food is developed. In the lead is the great scientist Meki in Edinburgh, along with Alice Layard in Chicago. Meki suffers a sad fate, reminiscent of Columbus after discovering America.2 The production of all food by chemical and industrial processes causes upheavals in the entire imperial economy, and so the issuing of free food proceeds only slowly. But then the consequences of Meki’s discoveries become monstrous. Agriculture and livestock breeding come to a halt, and farmland is almost entirely abandoned. Cities, already grown very big, swell even more. This turning point increases the World Empire’s power, and aggravates its problems. To offload resources under their control, Senates of the 26th C. unleash the Urals War. With this war they intend to confront the Asiatic peoples, who have up till now been allowed to share in western Progress.

1 [On arrival in Los Angeles, the last stop of his 12-year exile, Döblin was given a one-year contract with MGM, which in the end used none of his contributions to Random Harvest, Mrs Miniver and other films. This pitch provides a useful summary (based on the 1932 reworking of the novel), while blithely disregarding cinema’s technical capabilities of the time.] 2 [Columbus was briefly imprisoned after his 3rd voyage, for abuses committed as Governor of Santo Domingo.]

6

The Urals War, fought with new weapons on both sides, did not result in victory for the western empire. Asia withdraws into itself. In the empire, in reaction to the devastation of the war, opposition to technology and industry grows: the Settler movement and secret societies. Whole townzones try to secede from the empire. The population of several townzones returns to the open countryside. In Central Europe Marduk and Mutumbo create a peaceful Settler realm, whose existence endangers the empire. Dangerous ideas and fables spread across the technological empire. At this time the leaders in the Senates are Delvil in London, Ten Keir in Brussels, and the American woman White Baker. The urge among the masses to quit the cities and settle far away leads Delvil to a scheme to create a new land, thereby killing several birds with one stone: showing his power, pushing back against his adversaries, and where possible leading to new technological advances through the mobilisation of all forces. Hence the plan: to create a new continent by thawing Greenland.

Part 2: The Thawing of Greenland (the main story) The plan is to exploit the fires of the huge but extinct volcanoes on Iceland and use the heat to thaw Greenland. To do so, the extinct volcanoes must be reactivated. The resulting fires must at once be directed at the Greenland glaciers and icefields. So three stages: 1. Open up the Iceland volcanoes; 2. Capture the resulting heat, so that it can be transported to Greenland; 3. Convey the heat to Greenland and commence the thawing process. Section 1: Opening up the Iceland volcanoes The expeditionary fleet assembles at Shetland and the Faroes. There are leading ships with laboratories, technical auxiliaries, and transport vessels. Finally they are joined by cable-laying ships, which will convey energy from Scandinavian waterfalls. The leader is Kylin, a Swedish scientist. The fleet sails to Iceland. The expedition comprises men and women. On arrival, after reconnaissance flights, the working vessels take up position off the north-east coast of the island. Blowing up the mountain walls is no mere mechanical process. Preparatory work in which Kylin himself was involved is at their disposal. This developed out of botanical experiments in which, using gasses, nutritive mixtures and radiation, plants and germ- matter were accelerated to rampant growth. Similar experiments were conducted on crystals, using various rays. Kylin managed to stimulate crystals through specific rays to accelerated, inordinate growth. The botanist Marduk’s experimental results had already

7 been applied for military purposes in the Urals War. The volcanoes are now to be opened up through the inordinate expansion of crystalline components in their walls. First, bridgeworks are built around the first volcanoes. These will carry machines. Piles are smelted into the rock, and pivotable bridges are built so the machines can be retrieved as the volcanoes become reactivated. The machines are fetched from the ships and mounted on the bridgeworks. The volcanoes are exposed to rays from several directions. The first assault is on the volcanoes Krafla and Leirh[nj]ukr. They break open and spread in accordance with calculations. Then as they are set in motion they collapse and finally explode. This exposes the first of the fire-seas. The second assault is directed at the basalt masses of Dyng[j]a etc. Explosions and lava outflows result. The bridgeworks are pivoted too late; ships founder. One squadron flees and is brought back. The third assault is directed at Hekla and Katla. When they are torn open, an entire operational fleet is destroyed. The entire western population learns of the events, and feels involved. The leaders of the fleets grow into their task. They demand replacement vessels. Section 2: Tourmaline webbing The heat exposed in Iceland, intended for thawing Greenland’s glaciers, must now be captured. Tourmaline webbing is used for this. Here too there has been extensive preparatory work. The working principle is: tourmaline crystals under the effect of heat enter into a state of electrical tension. Crystallised masses of tourmaline must now be exposed to the volcanic heat and, once insulated, be transported to Greenland. Work to mine and crush tourmaline is undertaken in Texas and Brazil. It is piled up and moulded into thin sheets of tourmaline webbing. The webbing is transported in huge quantities to Iceland. On Iceland work begins to erect a new ring of pylons around the fire-lakes. Flotillas of planes set out from these to bring the webs close to the fiery surface. The planes must evade lava bombs. The fire-lakes must be broken open several times as they sinter over. Hangars are erected to receive the charged webbing, which is insulated in oil baths. When the Senates are informed of results so far, tension arises between the Senates and the expeditionary fleet under Kylin and De Barros. The Senates demand charged webbing for its own use, fearing it could be a new weapon.

8

A few webs are delivered, but envoys from the Senates are finally sent packing. The fleet sets out from Iceland. Section 3: The thawing proceeds The voyage to Greenland begins. Strange phenomena appear on the freighters carrying the tourmaline webs. Swarms of fish follow them, seaweed and algae grow high on and into the vessels. Whales refuse to be driven away. The crews of the vessels fall into a strange state, a tumultuous sense of great joy. Erotic scenes occur, the crews have to be changed. Gradually the vessels are enveloped in a glow, a twilight gleam, and are visible even at night. As they approach Greenland, the tourmaline ships are like floating forests. The ice barrier draws nearer. The uncanny phenomena on the tourmaline ships has instilled fear in the fleet and its leaders. Everyone wants to finish the job as quickly as possible, and flee. So an attempt is made, impulsively and without preparation, to spread webbing and remove the insulation. The webbing becomes extremely hot, melts the pylons supporting it, collapses and is shredded by glaciers. The arrival of ships bearing oil clouds is awaited. These vessels have facilities to produce oil-clouds, which have recently been developed. An earlier discovery – ‘slow smoke’ – has been perfected. This consists of heavy gasses that can be coloured, already used in the Urals War to kettle the enemy. But earlier versions lacked viscosity and coherence. Now the ‘slow smoke’ is intermediate between a gas and a liquid; it is dense enough to bear loads, and remains stable at specific heights. The vessels with the new smoke arrive off Greenland and take up positions. Smoke- blowers start up. Coloured masses of gas clump in the sky and remain stationary. Aeroplanes drop heat-resistant steel plates onto the oil clouds. Now there is a struggle with wind. Storms shred the clouds and drive them away with their human cargo. Now the layer of oil clouds is made thicker. The tourmaline webbing must be brought from the ships. Because the ships are completely overgrown, access has to be achieved by force. The holds have undergone changes, everything wooden has undergone rampant growth. The webbing emits rays and already a dull heat can be felt. The ships are emptied and the webbing is hauled onto the oil clouds and laid over the steel plates. Cables are connected so that the insulation layer can be removed. The ships race away south and east. On the third night the cables are activated. At once a wave of light erupts over the horizon.

9

The expeditionary corps, exhausted and inwardly deeply agitated, anchors in the harbours of Shetland and the Faroes. Section 4: Rosy light over Greenland On Greenland, the tourmaline webs are functioning. The rosy light shows this. Now the expeditionary fleet moves once again to the north, towards the rosy light. As they enter its zone a joyful mood comes over them. They become drunk on it. The sea is covered by a lawn, birds fly. Unusual weather phenomena occur, whirlwinds. The effect of the rosy light is so powerful that crews have to be coerced to continue. Some vessels drop back and refuse to go on. The Mutumbo episode. Most plough on. Eventually they are forced to flee and scatter by growing hordes of monstrous flying and swimming creatures heading south from Greenland. Meanwhile, on Greenland, icebergs, glaciers and avalanches have melted. The sea has flooded over the land; hills emerge from it. The waters recede; then an earthquake splits the land creating new inlets of the sea. The initial heat of the tourmaline webbing fades. The land lies under a tropical climate. And now the tourmaline webbing reveals its secret: Kylin and his people have captured not only heat from the volcanoes, but also a second power hidden in the Earth’s interior: seed-power, the power of growth, found concentrated in the interior. It was this power that became evident on the voyage to Greenland. Now as the heat from the webbing dissipates, it comes to the fore. The presence of this power leads to unforeseen effects on Greenland. Not only was Greenland de-iced, but the exposed continent has reverted to the Cretaceous. Bones and remains of animals and plants buried under the ice form starting points for incredible outburst of growth. Fern-forests grow, the seas are filled with fish. Extinct birds fly about. But some forms and creatures soon take on an unnatural and perverted character, for these are not the product of slowly working nature, but of an unleashed growth force. Monsters from the Cretaceous surge away from Greenland. They appear in the current world on the west coast of Europe, in Scandinavia, on the British Isles. In cold air their strength leaves them. Like the tourmaline vessels, as they approach they become loaded down with masses of other living bodies. They fall on several cities, and expire. But even touching them leads to fantastic effects. The monsters cause whatever touches them to grow: buildings, limbs of humans and animals. As the monsters collapse, objects and humans are squashed together. The population fleees in masses.

10

The Senates have no means to defend the cities. They debate impotently. They have to take refuge in caves. The hostile Settler movement grows in the countryside. There are attacks and the storming of several townzones. The Senates hit on the idea of confronting the monsters with similar creations; for they still have some tourmaline webbing. Section 5: Creating the Giants The final period of this stage of humanity now begins. Humans alter themselves biologically with the aid of technology. Leaders of the Senates exploit observations from the crashed Greenland monsters and their effect when touched. They turn to the biological rays emitted by tourmaline webs. First they aim to use the webs to defend against continuing danger from the monsters. Human beings are brought by the rays to an enormous growth. Organs from other animals are attached to them. To some extent the human is recast. These are the Tower Humans, placed on hilltops and special ships to counter the monsters and overpower them without injury to themselves. At this time the threatened cities go underground. Hence the Miracle City of London, a totally artificial place like several others, with no natural sky, no natural atmosphere, unaffected by weather, dug into rock. Humans develop here rather like the late Romans. But the leaders of the Senates and their friends turn the rays onto themselves too. They achieve a total transformation of the human species. They can become different animal species or convert their organs to those of other animals. They sit in their laboratory town of Tell el Habs. Section 6: Downfall of the Giants Counter-movements come from two sides: from the old anti-technology Settlers and the secret societies that attach to them: the Snakes etc. And also from the Greenland expeditionaries, the remnants of the corps who hid from the monsters in their Shetland caves. They are still led by Kylin. As the threat from the monsters recedes, they move to the Continent. The sea and the French landscape envelope them in pure Nature, lovely and peaceful. The landscape is littered with the ruins of cities, and abandoned cities. In Belgium, Kylin finds Ten Keir, the Senate leader who has brought down the Senate. As the Greenland voyagers move deeper into the country, their sense of security grows. In the south, Venaska joins their train. She has a mysterious air, everyone loves her. They call her Moon Goddess.

11

Kylin meets her near Toulouse. He is slightly bent, has a full grey-blond beard. Venaska wears gold-embroidered trousers and a crimson shirt. Kylin fears she will bedazzle his people and divert them from their task, which is now: to be steadfast. She does try to soften his rigidity, and he resists her. The Giants’ behaviour becomes ever more raving and insane. They are completely unrestrained. They feel only their omnipotence. They destroy the Meki factories. Finally they take their supply of tourmaline webbing to the hills of Cornwall. They plan an assault on the very Earth itself. Delvil summons the great Settler leader Marduk from his grave, to seek his advice. But Marduk rejects him. Meanwhile Kylin continues wandering with his band through the landscape, gathering more people. Near devastated Lyon he encounters Venaska again. He feels what she is, but spurns her. Venaska, who has a human sympathy for the Giants and for Delvil, flees to them to call them back to real life. But the Giants have become fossilised into hills in Cornwall. The power of the rays has dissipated. Section 7: Restoration of the Earth The Senates and cities of America have not been much troubled by the giant monsters. Developments there proceeded less violently. A new settling of Europe begins. The Settler movement is defeated by Kylin. Village states are to replace enormous townzones. The secret of Meki-food has been lost. Kylin and Ten Keir live on as leaders. As does a woman, the great Diuva. Memorial stones are erected to the Giants, who are worshipped as mighty humans. Ten Keir lives on among the New People. The New People, as Kylin tells Diuva, have strength, true knowledge – and humility.

END

12

AFTERWORD TO THE 2013 FISCHER KLASSIK EDITION OF BERGE MEEERE UND GIGANTEN Gabriele Sander

I know of no work in which the absolute absence of firm ground, the uncanniness of life is described more frighteningly. […] The writer has created a gigantic animated teeming living world-picture, analytical and mysterious, mythical and scientific. He has unsealed a flask of powerful potion. This contemporary judgement on Döblin’s futuristic novel Mountains Oceans Giants [MOG] was made by the poet Ernst Blass, in a review that hovers between fascination and irritation.3 Ever since its appearance in 1924, this ‘extravagant book whose theme is the heaven-storming extravagance of humanity’4 has called forth strong emotions, enthralled readers, but also provoked and polarised. Even more strongly than in his previous novels The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915/16) and Wallenstein (1920), in MOG (1924) Döblin surrendered himself to his exuberant imagination, and no doubt also to his obsessions. His prose, written as if under a visionary over-pressure, offers a cornucopia of images and stories of nightmarish intensity, and at the same time presents a radical break with reader expectations and narrative convention. Aesthetically and thematically, this utopia/fantasy is a novel of extremes, of excess and transgression. It cannot be placed unequivocally in terms of genre or style or literary period: alongside lyrical-dramatic depictions, late-Expressionist mannerisms and futuristically inspired experimental modes of expression (including broken rules of punctuation and sentence construction) we find sober descriptive passages saturated in facts, anticipating the ‘aesthetics of precision’ of the New Objectivity movement. In terms of content the narrative text, as innovative as it is strange, despite its effusiveness has forfeited none of its topicality, for it deals with the consequences of the boundless urbanisation, massification, dynamising and mechanising of the modern life- world, and brings vividly into view the associated phenomena of alienation and degeneration. In this ‘evolutionary experiment’5 the author shapes contemporary experiences and fears of uncontrolled technological developments and anticipates politically controversial topics such as migration, globalisation, totalitarianism, fanaticism, terrorism, state surveillance, biochemical weapons, genetic modification, birth control, and synthetic food as a response to resource limitations caused by problematic population growth. At the same time the novel’s concept of Nature in its critique of civilisation ‘anticipates, on the basis of knowledge in the natural sciences and philosophy around 1900, many aspects of modern ecology.’6 In so doing the novel

3 E Blass: review of MOG in Die neue Rundschau, 35/1 (June 1924) p.527-8. 4 Gunter Grass: Im Wettlauf mit den Utopien (In competition with Utopias). Die Zeit, 16 June 1978 5 W Schäffner (1995): Die Ordnung des Wahns: zur Poetologie psychiatrischen Wissens bei Alfred Döblin (Organising Insanity: on the poetology of psychiatric knowledge in Alfred Döblin). 6 M Hien (2012): ‘Anthropozän’ (Anthropocene). In Poetik des Wilden (Poetics of the Wild).

13 sounds out ‘the boundaries of the practical and the possible’7 and stimulates thinking about the ethics of technological progress. Impulses, sources and contexts ‘What will become of humanity if it continues to live like this?’8 This question Döblin himself says determined the conception of his new narrative work, begun in autumn 1921, and offered him a perspective directed at the present and the future: ‘I wanted the present day. … And epically, in motion, it could be nothing other than: the present day driven out beyond itself.’ In the rhetoric of the autobiography-coloured Dedication, his poetical Ego opens itself up to ‘that which – often with terror, now in calm, and harkening – I sense with such foreboding.’ In journalistic guise, Döblin as the pseudonymous Linke Poot [Left Paw] had already charted the political development of the young Weimar Republic after the failed revolution, publishing political commentary in the form of numerous satirical squibs. Now he chose the medium of the novel. This offered him a large-scale projection space for his confrontation with the modern civilisation that had exposed its ugly side in the First World War. Significantly he began the new novel with an explicit reference to the primal catastrophe of the 20th century: ‘None were still alive of those who had survived the war they called the World War.’ (MOG p.1) This anti-fairytale beginning might suggest that following generations have ‘survived’ the war and even forgotten it, but this ‘initiating event’9 forms very much more than a hastily abandoned historical springboard into a fantastical visionary fictional plot. The World War is the starting point and fulcrum of a temporal axis extending to the 27th century, which catapults the reader pell-mell into a future world which, despite all the techno-industrial innovations and their attendant conveniences in work and daily life, is frankly terrifying. As a doctor in a military hospital in Alsace, Döblin ‘experienced the unleashed power of weaponry, physical maiming and psychical suffering.’10 These experiences not only caused a sustained politicising impetus but also led to new focal points for literature. The war which even in Wallenstein did not want to end became a thematic constant in subsequent works: the archetype of the war-neurotic traumatised in body and soul appears as a permanent guest on his fictional stage. In MOG (Part 3) Marke returns distraught from his spell as a ‘scout with the technical troops’ in the Urals War unable to expunge the after-effects. Later came Manas in the eponymous Indian epic; Franz Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Friedrich Becker in November 1918, and Edward Allison in Döblin’s last novel Hamlet. In MOG, Döblin undertakes a narrative re-enactment of the First World War, the destructive excesses of which he takes to monstrous extremes in the fictional Urals War. In Part 2 he allows ‘unleashed Nature herself to become instrumentalised as a war-

7 [A quote from MOG Part 2, used as the title of Sander’s monograph on MOG.] 8 Döblin (1948): ‘Epilog’. 9 T Hahn (2003): Fluchtlinien des Politischen: das Ende des Staates bei Alfred Döblin (Flightlines of the Political. The end of the state in Alfred Döblin.) 10 A Honold (2010): ‘Globale Kriegslandschaften bei Alfed Döblin’. (‘Global landscapes of war in Alfred Döblin).

14 waging and war-determining power’11, thereby disclosing the ‘boundary transgressions of technological rationality.’12 A glance into the preparatory materials for this part of the work, imbued with autobiographical clues, reveals that it was poison-gas attacks in particular that aroused Döblin to his apocalyptic vision of a devastated dead landscape. But he is concerned in the novel with much more than depicting the destructive potential of modern (weapons) technology; rather he marks out first and foremost the means by which violence and barbarism, as well as uncontrollable racial and class war, make inroads into the civilising discourse of State and Society. It is significant that much is made in the post-Urals War sections of the ‘global loss of meaning (a worldwide PTSD depression).’13 The collective sickness of the post-Urals age is equally a diagnosis of the crisis-ridden politics and society of the early Weimar Republic. A different impulse in his new epic, which puts the conflict between Nature and Technology at centre stage, seems to emerge from questions of natural philosophy that occupied him increasingly from the early 1920s. His reflections on the relationship between Nature and Technology, natural science and metaphysics were formulated in several essays partly in parallel with the writing of BMG, published separately at first and then collected in the volume Das Ich über der Natur (Ego over Nature) in 1928. His new novel is dedicated to the same goal: to remind a modern humanity ever more alienated from Nature of its animal roots, and open a new window onto natural phenomena. In MOG his contemporary philosophical stances vis à vis Nature and History are transposed into the epic, embracing numerous current discourses. The concrete impetus came, as Döblin reported some months after publication, from a visual experience during a summer holiday in 1921: ‘Meanwhile on a Baltic beach I had seen some stones, ordinary pebbles, that moved me… Something was stirring in me, around me.’14 The first sketches were made back in Berlin. On 2 November 1921 he wrote to Efraim Frisch15 about his ‘new opus, which is going well. It’s the development of our industrial world to around 2500; a totally realistic and yet fantastical thing; Jules Verne will spin in his grave for jealousy – but my goal is quite different from his. This time no one will accuse me of always busying myself with historical material.’ In a large-format memorandum book that he used specially for sketching ideas for novels, he first set down the principal themes, including ‘The big city’, ‘Development of its industry and technology’, ‘The struggle between Nature and Technology’, ‘Alienation of mankind from natural forces’. To this early phase also belongs the idea of a Greenland Venture, already the topic of several sheets of notepaper in which Döblin fixed the main lines of the plot. Interestingly these adopt a ballad-like tone: ‘Now shall ye hear how this humanity fitted out its voyage to Greenland, and how it went with the first preparatory

11 T. Wolf (1993): Die Dimension der Natur im Frühwerk Döblins. (Dimension of nature in Döblin’s early works.) 12 K Scherpe (2002): Krieg, Gewalt und Science Fiction: Döblins MOG. (War, violence and Science Fiction: MOG.) 13 U Japp (2012): ‘Technikentwurfe in Romanen des 20. Jarhrhunderts‘ (‘Techno-projection in 20th C novels’) 14 Döblin: ‘Bemerkungen zu Berge Meere und Giganten’ (Remarks on MOG). Die neue Rundschau, June 1924 15 [Frisch was founder and publisher of the literary journal Der neue Merkur.]

15 foray on the island of Iceland. It went ill and badly, for it could not be otherwise, but it cleared the air like a thunderstorm.’ A first draft of the Venture sketched here was written in autumn 1921. But the direct address to the reader makes no further appearance in the handwritten drafts. In the first published edition, the first person appears only in the Dedication. Though Döblin tried early on to establish a plot structure, he always knew his projects developed a certain dynamic of their own. The author seems to a certain extent to have taken the advice he gave in his 1917 ‘Remarks on the Novel’16 (‘A novel is a matter of layering, piling up, rolling over, shoving around’), for the narrative sequences set down in his planning notebook lost their validity in the course of writing. Those motifs and figures that were taken on and developed are to be found outside the two ‘primal massifs’ of the Iceland-Greenland complex – which in the final version are pushed towards the end of the novel. A first excerpt appeared in the Vossische Zeitung (1 Jan 1922) as ‘The Melting of Greenland in the year 2500. The Magic Ship’. By this point the main plot elements had been conceived, as indicated by the introductory remarks: ‘The events take place towards the end of Marduk’s Second Consulate, in the state of Berlin around 2500.’ In the final version, Marduk’s rule occurs in the 27th century, and the Consul no longer plays a role in the Greenland Venture. Yet this excerpt must have been drafted not later than the end of 1921. The excerpt deals with the mulatto Bwana Mutumbo, who creates a living space for himself and his companions on the sea bed with the help of a gigantic net. In the final version this story occurs in Part 7 as an isolated episode; but according to Döblin it formed the creative spark that originated the whole Venture. At first the idea ‘gladdened me with its scale, its unboundedness, made me proud and cocky as a rider’ and, growing impatient, at the start of 1922 he closed his medical practice for four weeks to ‘make a start.’17 The Iceland-Greenland sections were carved out in the first quarter of 1922. At the same time he engaged in intensive research in Berlin libraries on the realia needed for descriptions of the geopolitical and ‘tellurian adventures’. He immersed himself in specialist works on the natural sciences, made excerpts from handbooks of oceanography, glaciology, meteorology, biology, geography, geology, mineralogy etc., sketched diagrams e.g. of air circulation, landforms, Iceland, Greenland. In the course of globalising the plot, which at first strongly focused on the Berlin townzone and Germany, Döblin widened his preparatory studies to cover ethnographic literature. He made excerpts from travelogues by Gustav Nachtigal (Sahara und Sudan), Georg Schweinfurth (In the Heart of Africa), H H Johnston (The River Congo: from its mouth to Bolobo), Aurel Krause (The Tlinggit Indians), A E Nordenskiöld (Greenland: the ice deserts of its Interior and the East Coast), Fridtjof Nansen (The First Crossing of Greenland), Alexander Baumgartner (Iceland and the Faroes), J C Poestion (Iceland: the land and the people in light of latest sources) among others. To attune himself to his theme he also visited the Oceanography and Natural History museums in Berlin. ‘I drew

16 Döblin: ‚Bemerkungen zum Roman‘ in Die neue Rundschau, March 1917. 17 Döblin: ‘Remarks on MOG’.

16 special maps of Iceland, delved into vulcanology and the science of earthquakes. It went swiftly into geology and mineralogy/petrography. As always I wrote and researched at the same time. I lived from hand to mouth.’ The manuscript file in the German Literature Archive, which together with the MS of the novel contains two extensive folders of excerpts, attests to this working process. As he wrote, Döblin consulted his mainly summary notes and even incorporated whole chunks word for word into his text. Large parts of the information gathered from the extensive source materials not only flowed into the text as a factual substrate, but the relevant specialist knowledge also shaped the structure and language here and there. The postulate of a ‘phantasy of facts!’ announced in the 1913 Berliner Programme achieves here, in the sense of a new kind of poetics of knowledge grounded in an ‘anti- narrative writing process,’18 a quite individual meaning and dimensions. With its many scientific-technological and anthropological excursuses encompassing almost all disciplines, as well as descriptions integrated into the plot – e.g. African, oriental and Indian tribes, their customs, rites and myths – the novel despite all its fantastical elements almost gains encyclopaedic status reflecting the knowledge of its time. Once the preliminary work was completed, from May 1922 Döblin retreated for several months to a secluded pension on the Schlachtensee in the suburb of Berlin- Zehlendorf, where he completed a coherent rewrite of the text. First he drafted a new work plan, as described in the ‘Remarks’: In the first part, the conquest of the world is over. Plan for de-icing Greenland. There are urban districts with remnants of nationalities that hate each other. A Negro from the Gold Coast. The machine-lords make use of the man of violence. A scene: the mowing down of the excess people, and then of the machine-lords themselves. Corpses of those shot, embalmed, hung from pillars for decades, but were not silent. At specified times moved their arms, screamed harshly. This was Mutumbo’s clock. – Frenzy following the de-icing of Greenland. They want to lay waste to all the city-states. Then the transformation of the pleasure-city, City of Brass [a motif from The Arabian Nights]. A figure: lanky very young man with deepset eyes, megalomaniac. Claims descent from gods, and orders their worship. Has people worship him, in animal form. He constructs a hill, and there in a bowl-shaped depression his palace with its towers. The Greenland campaign is conceived and crushed by him.

Spread of this regime across the whole Earth. Shattering images of the flight and retreat of African and Arab hordes out of the cities. The last people have the capacity to rejuvenate themselves. They cannot die. The rejuvenation process, or maintenance of a particular age. Sleeplike trance. These contrasted with the Naturals, the older peoples. Their last battle. Other notes preserve interesting insights into Döblin’s creative processes, for they show that his imagination, as in earlier works, was sparked strongly by historical

18 Scherpe, op. cit.

17 figures even where a vision of the future is concerned. The notes show that the tyrannical Berlin Consul Marduk (in earlier drafts called Rebmair/-maier) was first inspired by the Roman tyrant Caligula, who elevated himself to God-Emperor. Other almost identical depictions of this mad despot occur in his notebooks from the period when MOG was written. The published text no longer has any reference to this ancient model, though some physiognomic and personality qualities noted by Döblin from the start are retained. The conception of the Marduk character shifted during the writing towards other sources of inspiration, notably Babylonian mythology. It is noteworthy how in the early sketches Döblin’s own ideas are linked with mythological, biblical, historical and literary motifs, a writing process reflected inter alia in the syncretistic depiction of typical fictional characters and the extreme heterogeneity of names. In the ‘Remarks’ Döblin cites another sketch plan that he says ‘directed’ the work: Marduk’s realm. Meanwhile the terrible further growth of [scientific/technological] discoveries. The discoveries attack even this realm. That’s Part I. Part II: war against Nature. Greenland the high point. Nature falls on the attackers, failure of the enterprise. Part III: gentle coming together. Troubadours. The Troubadour motif appears even in the earliest notes, alluding at least in terms of topography and atmosphere to the final Part set mainly in southern France. Döblin’s interest in old French poetry and the Crusades no doubt originated in his previous project, for in a play written in the first half of 1921 called The Nuns of Kemnade he had busied himself intensively with mediaeval history and culture. His notebooks for 1921- 22 contain bibliographic entries on the Crusades, Byzantium, the Inquisition, and Minnesang. In the ceaseless streams of migration in the future world of MOG, Döblin allows the oral tradition of the Middle Ages to be passed on by African theatre troupes arriving in Europe. These ‘sang and spoke as had many centuries before the jongleurs and troubadours of southern France and the Po plain.’ The three extensive ‘comedies fairytales love stories’ in the middle of the novel reveal how Döblin was inspired by Africa’s rich oral culture, conveyed since the end of the 19th century in numerous anthologies. The figure of the despotic King Mansu, choked by his own greed, was no doubt taken from Georg Schweinfurth’s depiction of the Central African Mangbattu chief Munsa, to whom Neronic features were ascribed. The fair copy of the MS that emerged from this complex multi-sourced process of creation was completed mainly in the seclusion of Zehlendorf. Döblin’s time there was certainly highly productive, but suffused with extreme mental tension. His sojourn, alluded to explicitly in the Dedication, must in the end have become a torment. Looking back he refers to an ‘almost neurotic condition’ which drove him ‘to interrupt the work: the phantasies were too wild and my brain would not let go of me.’19 Shortly after returning to his family he described his extremely delicate spiritual state in a letter to Gustav Klingelhöfer20 of 30 September 1922: ‘I was already ill at that time, had to return

19 Döblin’s Journal 1952-53. 20 [Klingelhöfer was an SPD politician, imprisoned at this period for his revolutionary activities.]

18 from the room I had sought where I could work in seclusion, back to Berlin where I vegetate until now malade. The clang of a prison without a prison; a never ending psychic-nervous collapse; I am not yet back on my feet.’ Döblin clearly needed time to be restored to himself and recommence his literary work. In early 1923 he composed the final Part: ‘It was a happy feeling when in May 1923 I conceived Venaska’s fate.’21 In August he finally completed his ‘hymn to great Nature’. Even before completing the work, Döblin presented selected passages to the public in nine printed excerpts and some readings. It appeared in early 1924 with a dust wrapper nicely designed by the graphic artist Maria Andler-Jutz to show an abstract landform recalling the Prism style of Lyonel Feininger. There were nine printings (9000 copies); by the early 1930s it was out of print. Reworkings: ‘An Adventure Book’ and a screenplay No doubt in order to make this unwieldy opus more accessible, in June 1924 Döblin published autobiographical ‘Remarks’ on the novel’s creation, an explanation of his intention – actually an attempt to provide philosophical and artistic self-assurance. Probably in the second half of 1931 Döblin set about the novel again, this time in order to revise the text to a more readable form accessible to the masses, and severely simplify the narrative structure – at the price, it must be said, of clear artistic flattening. With the new version he aimed to put into practice his controversial proposal to ‘lower the general level of literature’22 and abolish the bourgeois monopoly of education. The new edition (titled Giganten), with a dust cover designed by Georg Salter, was one-third shorter than the original; it appeared in March 1932 with an Afterword by Döblin in which he confessed to having changed his basic stance toward Nature and Technology: Behind the new book was a man who acknowledged a human task, who knows meaning and even sees it in this ‘Nature’, who knows the role of the will, of power and consciousness, and takes account of how these encroach on Nature. Döblin rewrote the first chapter almost entirely, to bring out more clearly the social and political consequences of technological progress; but the revisions, carried out with less than total care, led to some anomalies. The rigorous cutting of passages, in particular those dealing with individual fates, ‘pervert the intentions of the new edition almost to their opposite.’23 Giganten, like MOG, lacks a ‘concrete political programme’; the Settler Utopia of an open peaceful society remains vague and schematic. The solution posed at the end of the new book to the conflict between Nature and Technology is quite unconvincing; the proposed synthesis remains abstract: ‘There was no decision for the Machine; neither was there a decision for the Settlers. A third word was there: the Law!’ The essence of this is ‘a wonderful new knowledge of the Human’, consisting of insight into the ambivalence of life. The book ends with a bathetic appeal for a breakthrough: ‘A new day has dawned, forget not where you were yesterday.

21 Döblin ‘Remarks on MOG’. 22 [Döblin was irritated by the way most German writers catered to the tiny minority of the highly educated]. 23 K Müller-Salget (1988): Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung (Döblin‘s works and development)

19

Forget not what riverbanks constrain you, in cities, mountains and in the fields: the great Law.’ In Hollywood exile Döblin undertook a further reworking of the book. Employed by MGM, he conceived a plan to write film treatments for some of his novels, among them MOG. In the winter of 1940-41 he drafted an ‘Outline’ – based on the Giganten reworking – titled ‘The Melting of Greenland’. The two-part text comprising a Prelude and seven scenes is all the more disconcerting for Döblin’s completely false estimation of how such fantastical material could be realised. Given the technological capabilities of present day cinema, the adaptation no longer appears as impossible as in the 1940s. Reception As with the earlier novels, contemporary reviews of MOG fall into two groups. Among the thirty or so reviews (several in national and even international periodicals – Vienna, Basel, Stockholm, Warsaw, Bratislava, New York, etc.), we find enthusiastic discussions alongside reserved and brusquely hostile pieces. Emphatic hymns of praise for Döblin’s ‘Homeric strengths’ or his ‘titanic imagination’ are matched by cruel hatchet jobs. Volker Klotz in his Afterword to the 1977 edition of MOG referred to ‘hurdles’ facing the reader; contemporary critics, too, noted difficulties in reading a novel requiring such concentration and patience. Moritz Goldstein, a former classmate of Döblin’s and now editor of the Vossische Zeitung, showed sympathy for the reader who ‘fails to relish such a riot of imagination and hurls the book into the corner.’ The most varied grounds were adduced for such readerly obstacles and irritations: unfamiliar material, unusually broad spatio-temporal dimensions of the narrative, confusing multitude of characters and storylines, absence of an organising sense-making narrative voice, and even of narrative coherence, linguistic rampancy, and unconstrained mixing of elements from mythology, history and science, as well as from travelogues, adventure novels and horror stories. Karl Strecker spoke of an ‘epic steamroller that rolls, unhindered by punctuation, to flatten the world.’ Heinrich Zillich summed up: ‘The impression that remains is one of chaos.’ As well as these aesthetic considerations, ideological and ethical-moral objections were raised. These were directed mainly at what were seen as provokingly crass and revolting depictions of excessive violence; the extensive treatments of psycho- pathological characters and phenomena also called forth annoyance, revulsion and even anger. Some reviewers criticised not just the norm-breaching immoderation and lack of constraint in the novel (e.g. ‘a piling up of strong and at times rather coarse effects’), but also imputed to the author a cynical view of humanity and a ‘dangerous preference for the perverse and disgusting’. Those few critics who enquired into the intentions behind the depicted decadence and lapses into barbarism categorised them under the apocalyptic theme of an eschatological novel, or built a bridge to current civilisational and technological discourses, explicitly or implicitly referencing Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-22).

20

The prognosis of Ernst Blass that MOG was such a ‘mighty work’ it would be ‘read, studied and reprinted for decades’ turned out at first to be wrong. While Döblin’s controversial experiment in fiction was discussed in numerous papers on literary history and stylistics, following the Second World War it languished – not helped by the lack of a new edition until 1977 – almost unnoticed or brusquely dismissed. In his last years Döblin saw himself reduced to the author of just one work, and lamented his identification with Berlin Alexanderplatz alone. This one-sided recognition changed only slowly from the 1960s and 70s. As late as 1967 Günter Grass was able to note that ‘Döblin’s value has not been and will not be noticed.’ In his speech on the tenth anniversary of Döblin’s death, ‘On my teacher Döblin’, he referred to the now forgotten ‘Utopian adventure book’: Between a death in a Bohemian-mythical forest [Wallenstein] and the murder of Mieze in the Freienwald near Berlin [Berlin Alexanderplatz], Döblin projected mass murder in a Utopian forest, whereby to me, the reader, no forest grew more real out of this book than the one synthetically cultivated by the researcher Marduk, who wanted to bring an end to all science, who, himself a destructive thinker, locked thought up in vegetation as the cause of all disturbances; only his thoughts remained outside and persisted. Within literary studies it was above all Klaus Müller-Salget who in his monograph on Döblin cast new light on this novel neglected by scholars, and stimulated further work. Under the rubric ‘Peripeteia’ he located MOG as a turning point in the whole oeuvre, since this novel revealed a turn away from collectivism in favour of the individual, i.e. a re-evaluation of the Person and its relationship to Nature. He did not deny its weaknesses and contradictions, but blamed these on the ‘ambivalence of conception’ and Döblin’s at first rudimentary revision of his earlier view of humanity and his ambivalent stance vis à vis technology. There followed several dissertations and monographs on the novel, focusing among other things on the peculiar structure of the narrative and imagery, as well as the political implications, and anchoring the work in contemporary discourse. New editions (the 1977 reprint was followed in 2006 by a critical edition with commentary) stimulated a wider readership and research leading to new findings and stronger efforts to elucidate meaning. In his 1977 Afterword Klotz recommended a ‘rational-sensual engagement’ with the novel and proposed two quite distinct readings: as a tale of wonders and horrors (a Super Anti-fairytale), and as Science Fiction. He concludes his ‘usage hints’ thus: ‘After 50 years several of the book’s impositions no longer seem quite so crude. It certainly does not show its age.’ Grass came to a similar conclusion from quite a different direction, publishing his experience as a reader of MOG in his article ‘In competition with Utopias’. In it he confronts his concrete experiences, while travelling through Asia and Africa, with Döblin’s ‘accelerated leaps of thought’ and reflects in a highly original way on the relationship between fiction and reality. He is not concerned to prove predictions of the future right or wrong, but rather to reveal experiences of loss and escalation in a globalised world. With Döblin’s literary projections a shadow-play on the wall, Grass

21 thematises the urgent actuality of its depicted fields of conflict, and the insights, concealed behind all the fantasy, into social processes, mechanisms and structures that have already become reality in various places or are showing up on the horizon. ‘Multiplicity of nature in relation to humanity’ MOG documents in the broadest form Döblin’s anthropological interest in biological, ethnic, socio-cultural and spiritual multiplicity. The universal-history dimensions of the novel provide the author with a wide field of vision covering almost every continent and cultural realm. On the one hand, campaigns of post-colonial conquest are shown in diverse guises: violent invasions and warlike assaults, as well as technological missionising among ‘primitive peoples’, at the cost of destroying premodern cultures. On the other hand, we read of mass migrations and streams of refugees on a global scale, of intercultural border-crossings and mingling, phenomena of assimilation and dissimilation, but above all, the attendant problems and conflicts revealed episodically in individual fates. The novel thereby presents the most varied play of multi- and trans- culturality, and against a background of the loss of boundaries and of hybridisation brings into focus the anthropological multiplicity of ethnicities and cultures menaced by dubious power-political interests. The first Part already exemplifies this threat on the African continent, when ‘pale iron-driven men and women’ from Europe arrive to ‘show the power of their devices’. No longer do these rely on methods familiar from colonial history – abduction, looting – but on a strategy to draw indigenous peoples onto their path by revealing the ‘miracle devices of the Northerners’, in particular their weaponry. As a result, hordes of ‘sweat- steaming men and women with the flashing melancholy eyes’ leave their tribes, fight with one another and surge towards the ‘sources of these powers’ – with fatal results: ‘Many fled back yearning for freedom, died unable to love the old ways or to accept the new, despised by the dissolving remnants of their tribes.’ The enumeration, typical for this Part, of African tribal names becomes in this context a catalogue of dying cultures. Elsewhere in the novel there appear other ‘indices of loss’, of non-European ethnicities disappearing from the Earth in the course of the depicted globalisation and its attendant levelling of national, cultural and linguistic differences. Given this background, all these names signalling foreignness and particularity take on a special role. In his preliminary studies – in particular his reading of various explorers’ reports – Döblin wrote down lists of names on which he drew as the need arose. The archive contains lists with several columns of ‘Arabic names’, ‘Negro names’, or ‘names of Venetian patriarchs’, though without giving sources or contexts. Döblin actually used only a fraction of these. He was clearly intrigued by the sonority of the names which appeared to him suited to showing, within the multi-cultural figures that people the novel, the differences of origin and language tradition, in the sense of recalling an original multiplicity. In a future world of unimpeded techno-industrial expansion, leading to an “almost uniform mass of people” and the removal of national borders, the varied foreign-sounding names seem nevertheless to be mere postmodern syncretisms or constructs.

22

The biotechnological ‘levelling towards a mass of humanity’ at times becomes the dominant ideology: propagandists of the so-called Wind and Water Theory point to the ‘uniformity of water and air particles’ and see in this a transferable model for human society which will guarantee the ‘equality and happiness of the individual’. But such efforts to eradicate the ‘disturbance factors’ arising from individual, ethnic and national diversity never completely succeed in collectivising behaviour and aligning all interests. Not only do relicts of traditional structures persist, but they keep breaking through the surface of hidden conflicts, whose origin lies in the suppression of cultural differences. The mass upheavals in the social, power and population-political spheres also affect gender relations. In his ‘Remarks’ Döblin reflected on the new way of representing women, who in earlier works mostly played minor roles. And in 1917 he had proposed a motto for the epicist: ‘Mulier taceat (Let the woman stay silent)’ in order to be rid of the traditional love novel and avoid the supposed danger of the idyllic and the private. Now he consciously approached the theme of Woman, that ‘splendid phenomenon the Female’. In a martial-chauvinistic tone he specified the conditions for an epic presentation of women: ‘You have to break their venomous fangs; crush from the first whatever is sweet, pompous, shrewish, interesting in them. What remains is the proper female … the simple elementary beast, the other species of humanity, man-woman.’24 Gender issues play a major role in the novel. In Döblin’s futuristic scenario, traditional role models are quickly thrown overboard, ‘marriages and bonds of subjection between man and wife’ are simply ‘destroyed’, and familial forms of living together die out. A new type of Amazon forms the ‘avant-garde in the struggle for Technology’. In an age of ‘strict mass ideals’ bitter power struggles erupt around ‘female domination’ after the ‘newly rising women’ have formed themselves into paramilitary ‘Female Leagues’ to strive for autonomy and determine ‘birth politics’. In the dynamic ebb and flow of the fictional chronicle of events, defined by movements and counter-movements, regressive tendencies cause women nevertheless to undergo severe defeats and perfidious humiliations, especially in times of crudest male power such as the period of Marduk’s rule when barbaric hordes, aroused ‘to blood’ by ‘memories of ancient matriarchy’, treat women in a ‘cynical manner’. Beyond the depictions of gender-specific conflicts in a context of sociopolitical power, the novel not only perpetuates a settled spectrum of social and literary conventions but also a ‘multiplicity of Nature in regard to Humanity’, in which belong ‘varying types’ with no definite gender identity, such as the ‘wild creature’ Tika On (Part 9), and the ‘shemales’ of the Giants who pursue their dreadful body-experiments in sinister ‘experimental cellars’. Imagined femininities range from Melise, the ‘cruel queen of Bordeaux’ as an archetype of the degenerate ruler-figure (Part 1), to the cold domineering Marion Divoise (Part 3), whose love-hatred for Marduk drives her to suicide, to the gentle “redeemer” Elina (Part 4) and the erotic nature-child ‘Moon goddess’ Vaneska (Part 9). The many love stories woven into it unfold their effect ‘beyond normal and perverse’, e.g. the very complex triangular relationship among

24 Döblin: ‘Remarks on MOG’.

23

Marduk, Jonathan and Elina, or the erotic relationship burdened by ethnic and socio- cultural differences between the English female senator White Baker and the Red Indian girl Rachenila (Part 8), or between the engineer Holyhead and the Bedouin couple Bou Jeloud and Jedaida (Book 7). A true Happy Ending is found only in fairytales: in the novel, the African ‘Fable of the Lion and the Wild Dog’ (Part 5) in which the poor shepherd boy Liongo is at last allowed to take the ‘lovely slender’ chieftain’s daughter Mutiyamba ‘into his hut’. Here Döblin probably used consciously the name of the legendary East African hero Liongo, a master of song and bowmanship, whose life and deeds are relayed in the most varied versions especially among the Swahili and Pokomo along the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania. In Europe, he was first introduced by Bishop Edward Steere in 1870 (Hadithi ya Liongo – Story of Liongo). Later came stories and poems in collections and specialist works, some ascribed to him, including songs of praise to female beauty. In the central part of his novel Döblin thus draws attention to the exemplary variety, colour and human depth of the African oral narrative tradition, placing him among the earliest of the literary avant-garde to discover the Africa theme and apply it epically with astonishing breadth and power of discrimination. The visionary way in which he sets out the political topicality of post-colonial globalisation is matched by the clarity with which he recognised the enriching potential of African culture and literature. So it is not by chance that small groups of Africans suddenly turn up in Europe with their theatrical pieces – parables, critiques of civilisation and ruling power – bringing ‘a new as yet ungraspable element to the rattling already lame still roaring howling machine- powered western cities’, leading some of the audience to revise their thinking. The ‘tenderness of their tales and songs’ actually ‘melts all hearts’, but forces the degenerate disoriented town-dwellers to reflect on their mode of life and form alternative Settler communities influenced by anarchist traditions, their goal ‘a fundamentalist Green eco- revolution’25 that threatens the foundations of political power. It is these marginalised ‘primitives’ who finally contribute to the emergence of a small but effective counter- movement which, as the novel’s ending shows, bears the seeds of renewal.

END

25 Honold op.cit.

24

REMARKS ON MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS Alfred Döblin, Die Neue Rundschau, June 1924

After my novel Wallenstein, in 1919-20 I was caught up vigorously in politics, continually, not least in writing; staked a position. With my Linke Poot (Left Paw). That was a different kind of style, of speaking; it was good that I gave it a distinct name. For Kant was not Kant when he was a Geography professor (which he also was). Then some messing about: a mediaeval drama came along.26. Meanwhile on a Baltic beach I had seen some stones, ordinary pebbles, that moved me. I brought stones and sand home. Something was stirring in me, around me. When at the war’s end I brought Wallenstein home from Alsace without a concluding chapter, I felt around, sought around in me how I should end it. Best not to at all, I sometimes thought. Then, at the beginning of 1919 in Berlin, I was profoundly affected by some blackened tree-trunks on the street. That’s where he must go, I thought, the Emperor Ferdinand. What stirred me, the stream of feelings, a new spirit, at once seized on what it had found. Commandeered what another related transient vanishing spirit had left behind. How feeble, to stick the label ‘re-orientation’ on this. We are terribly fouled up in our thinking, by our daily practical dealings with its clear challenges, by the need for quick decisions, by habit. Puzzling things are no longer a puzzle when repeated ten times over, without in the least being cleared up. Most discoveries and scientific thinking consist of grabbing chunks from the jaws of habit and showing their obscurity. I ‘re-oriented myself’: it was merely the symptom of an inward process. When I saw the blackened tree-trunks and was affected by them, the consequence was a child stirring in its mother’s womb. Emperor Ferdinand had to go right away down that path. I laughed, but allowed him no grace period. I felt: this is a break. It’s no longer Wallenstein but something new. But I ought to and must lead the Emperor to it, whatever his past. Even if he should only become lost in this new realm, and pass away. And what else should he do: even I couldn’t find my feet there. But I had to give the book this wonderful full stop. Even today I’m glad I allowed no contradiction, rule, consequence to trouble me, but set down want I was able to, what I loved, and let it go from me. The full stop wasn’t the end of it. With me it’s like this: some things start by entrancing me, but I can’t pursue them systematically. They slip away. I don’t know where they go to, but if they’re important they come back again and again, and that’s the way I ‘pursue’ these things. It’s a kind of acid test that things undergo. If they don’t come back they are deleted and were as nothing. Amid all the politics I spent some months in 1920 – I don’t know how it happened – occupied with biology, which I hadn’t bothered with for years, and then with all sorts of

26 [Döblin’s play The Nuns of Kemnade, written in mid-1921, was performed in Leipzig in April 1923.]

25 natural science stuff. I sniffed about here and there. Took notes on ants and the curious way they construct their fungus gardens, then stuff from astronomy and geology. I had no idea where it was leading. […]. But the stones from the Baltic moved me. For the first time, really for the first time I hesitated, no, was reluctant, to return to Berlin, to that city of buildings, machines, masses of humanity, which otherwise I clung, clung fast to. I had a desire to stay longer in free Nature and let these things, for once, play around me. Since childhood I have been a townie, a big-city dweller; at the age of fifteen, on a country outing, I saw my first cherry tree. It seemed ridiculous, romantic enthusiasm, vapid time-wasting to bother myself with the countryside. Prussian discipline, facts, sobriety, diligence: these were instilled in me at the Gymnasium. I still remember my almost breathless joy when the first cables for Berlin’s electric trams were being strung, and the mockery of my schoolmates when I went a half-dozen times to the Kroll Opera, not to a show but to stand by the basement entrance and gaze at a machine whose purpose I didn’t know but which held me enthralled. Until recently I had something against Nature, I often said so and even wrote it. Even today I’m repelled by the search for aesthetically beautiful landscapes. It’s pathetic to look at a bank of clouds and see nothing but nice shadows. The world is not there for gawping. Young ladies are not the measure of all things. Then, as I’ve said, after the war it came over me. […] Stones from the Arendsee27. It had me. The ascetic of the Prussian school receded. Or redeployed. Tears flowed, the Earth fetched me. I set down some essays: ‘Water’, ‘Nature and her souls’, ‘Buddha and Nature’. Wanted to make a little book of them, but didn’t, couldn’t. The maxim of these ideas was ‘I – am – not’. I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for explanations. I noticed I was not the only one lacking an attitude towards Nature, the World Being; there were many others. Puzzled, I now viewed textbooks, for which I once had respect, quite differently. I sought and found nothing. They knew nothing of the secret. Every day I experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, a cornucopia of processes quietly mingling and criss-crossing. It happened that I’d sit over my coffee and be unable to find my way to what was happening: the white sugar grains vanished in the brown liquid, dissolved. Now how was that possible: ‘dissolve’? What was something flowing, fluid, hot doing to the solid to make it give way, snuggle up? I know I often became frightened, physically frightened, giddy in the face of these things – and sometimes, I confess, even now I feel uneasy. For some months the pressure of these things was so strong I deliberately turned away from them. I had to. Had to write something to be rid of them. Something different, quite different. Resolutely I set to. Best would be something epic. I could throw myself into that most easily, it would carry me far away. – What happened was strange. Critics had reproached me for always painting some grand historical canvas. So they were challenging my imagination. This annoyed me. This time I’d steer well clear of

27 [Large lake in Saxony-Anhalt.]

26 history. […] I wanted something of the present time. Something pointed, active, to counter the ‘happening’ of Nature. Me against my Nothing. And nothing could be more epic, more in motion, than: drive the present time out beyond itself. Nothing could be done with the present as such: I’m no Zola or Balzac. I needed an empty space, beyond the present. Thus, the future. That would be the most fertile field for activity and phantasy. When I found it I was glad. I sent out a couple of feelers. The first part I wrote was the voyage of the Negro Mutumbo, later included in the Greenland section of the completed work. Here someone crosses the sea, burns holes in it, has a magic cloak, the sea has to put a stop to it. Then came a plan for a huge expedition, at first I didn’t know where to. But I didn’t want to take off to the stars, this would be an adventure on the Earth, wrestling with the Earth. So: these people, nothing more than a kind of bacteria on the Earth’s skin, become over- mighty from brains and cleverness. They take up the proud imperious struggle with the Earth. Soon, at the end of 1921, I had my goal: Greenland: icy waste, the volcanoes of Iceland trained on it. I had an image of glowing ovens: volcanoes as ovens, equipped with huge chimneys, heat-conveyors, heat-channels, reaching across the sea to Greenland. Volcanoes massively reshaped, the Earth loosened in its depths. At the end of 1921 I felt my way, borne along by an idea that gladdened me with its scale, its boundlessness, it made me proud and cocky like a rider racing his horse across the steppe. I felt my way over the terrain: Atlantic Ocean, Iceland, Greenland. In the National Library, City Library I devoured atlases, geography books, specialist maps, wandered through museums – Oceanography, Natural History. The background became clearer. I pinned it down in the big clothbound notebook where I sketched plans for my novels: ‘The big city. Development of its industry and technology. It’s prodigious, more prodigious than Nature. First there were kings. Song of the knights. History of this Earth. Wars. Science. Then came the workers. The big city: Berlin. What lived there. Struggle of Nature with Technology. Erotic types. How finally a volcano is opened up. Or how houses are left empty. They won’t let houses rule over them. Alienation of people from nature.’ Epic and Hymn. Hymn to the city. By the beginning of 1922 I was so impatient I abandoned my professional work for four weeks to make a start on it. It revolved around the Iceland-Greenland adventure. I drew special maps of Iceland, delved into vulcanology and the science of earthquakes. It went swiftly into geology and mineralogy/petrography. As always I wrote and researched at the same time. I lived from hand to mouth. At first, anyway. Gradually as I work I gain an overview of my needs, put my materials in order. The collection grows to a substantial volume as I work, arranged in my file-box alphabetically according to key words. In the first quarter of 1922 the Iceland-Greenland section was put to bed. I knew roughly where the momentum was coming from, not yet where it would lead. But soon I noticed something. I had moved out in order to evade the terrible mystical Nature-complex. And – was sat in the middle of it. In the middle. In my hands I held books on mineralogy, petrography, geography, looked at rocks in the museum! I was deep in it again from another direction. Sunk. It had reared its head again. The

27 strongest weapon I had raised against this heavy, chest-tightening concept was of no use. I myself was engaged in the Theme: human strength against Nature’s power, the impotence of human strength. Without knowing or wanting it, I had made a mirror- image of my little special effort. Yet I was not the same now as I had been before starting the book. I keep saying ‘Nature’. It’s not the same thing as ‘God’. It’s darker, huger than God. The complete whirling secret of the world. But still something of ‘God’. It seems right to me that people approach this intimidating riddle with shoes in the hand, and only seldom. Now as I wrote I found that the way I felt about the secret had changed. I found myself facing a secure, strong power that demanded expression, and my novel had a specific task: to praise the World Being. I – prayed. That was the transformation. I prayed and let go. I resisted as meekly as one resists in prayer. My novel was no longer a gigantic struggle among city-states, but an affirmation: a comforting and celebratory song to the great Mother Powers. Around May 1922, while I was in seclusion for several months, I gave voice to this in the Dedication. I laid down my arms before the autonomous Will in me. And knew and know: an autonomous Power was making use of me. Around this time I set aside the basically finished Iceland-Greenland books, and began to write systematically from the beginning, according to a plan.28 […] This was distributed and planned over and around the Iceland-Greenland books. That I distributed so much and always more in this central section had the secret advantage that I kept … withdrawing from it, that at least temporarily I … ducked out. The first two books are this undermining, an introduction. I was swiftly captivated, had to follow on, to see and set down vividly how, under the flourishing onward march of technology, mankind as a social organism and as the human animal conducts itself. It wasn’t possible to expand further on this; but everything I touched on was at risk of growing into an entire book. I constantly had to cut back and apply the brakes. To give myself respite and keep coming up for air, from time to time I broadened out the report – whole sections could only be a report – to an oasis-like tale, allowed events to spread. Hence Melise of Bordeaux and the whole Urals War and other smaller passages. After Synthetic Food and the Urals War, at first no more progress was possible, no way over the ridge. Another register was needed. After the masses and density of the first books I had to let in something lighter and more personal. I am an enemy of the personal. It’s nothing but swindle and lyricism. The epic has no use for individual persons and their so-called fate. Here they become the voice of the mass, which is the real and natural (hence epic) person. The individual fate of a city-state, Berlin as representative, now developed; Marduk, the second Consul, his friend Jonathan and the woman Elina accompanied and unfolded and gave voice to the events. These two books, the third and fourth, became a novel in themselves. There the theme of the whole work was taken to its bitter end, even surpassing the Iceland-Greenland adventure. Marduk and Elena were the first to lay down the arms used against Nature and really against themselves.

28 [See the text quoted on p. 9 above.]

28

Marduk was dismembered, melted down by Elena and returned to the Earth. Behind and beneath his life of violence, he found himself. And so I had run right past my Greenland obstacle. Had shot right over it. What to do with it. No problem: it had been the individual fate, insular, menaced, of one city-state. The whole of technology, the monstrous apparatus of power of western humanity was still alive. They would have to follow Marduk’s path. The scheme looks like this:

Parts 5 - 9 Parts 1 & 2 Parts3&4 [Marduk]

Parts 1 and 2 reach the point where technology breaks down, and stay there. Marduk, over two books, leads us to the goal of the whole novel. Humanity as a whole must take a long enormously sweeping path in order, much later, to reach the same goal. This from Part 5 to the end. After the Marduk parts I had to feel my way via a transitional part, the fifth, towards the two colossal parts of the Iceland-Greenland Venture. Now a quite new song started up. The really big one. A new spirit knocked the stuffing out of the original sketch. It was the Urals War again, but not brief and ending inconclusively, but full-width and working out all the consequences. Now the whole of humanity would meet its fate. In general I was steered by a plan I’d sketched thus: ‘Marduk’s realm. Meanwhile the terrible further growth of discoveries. The discoveries attack even this realm. That’s Part I. Part II: war against Nature. Greenland the high point. Nature falls on the attackers, failure of the enterprise. Part III: gentle coming together. Troubadours.’ But this was only a general direction of growth. The details were created in the moment, developed according to circumstances. And great Nature never moved against the humans – Humans assailed her. Those who opened their hearts and their eyes met a richer fate than Marduk. Kylin and Venaska are not continuations of Marduk and Elina. The characters in the later books have no independent existence, are very close to Nature. Venaska especially is never released from the (geographical and epic) landscape. Just as I had hesitated long over the last chapter of Wallenstein, so here with the last book. After the collapse there was really no more to say. But in the months while I was writing the later parts I was long since done with much of what I wrote. The inner drive had been lifted. At first I’d been impatient to get to grips with these things; now, to be free of them. For a while I’d often been asking: ‘Where are you at now?’ It was a happy feeling when in May 1923 I conceived Venaska’s fate: the suffering yearning soul sinks itself in the horrible rampaging Giants, calls them her brother, and they die willingly. We are not lost to the other powers. We can have agency. The mighty realm of natural ‘souls’. It’s no longer this book… .

29

In some respects this was a peculiar book for me. Its style, for one. Normally I relish concision, objectivity. Here I was unable to resist impulses of a purely linguistic kind. It went wide and colourful. It was as if everything wanted to be autonomous, and I had to be on my guard. The lofty plane of several parts, their solemn hymn-like character, contributed to this. I also confess I had the feeling I was no longer in the region of my own prose or normal prose, in the purely linguistic. Where the journey’s going I don’t know. The old verse-forms seem to me impossible. You shouldn’t force anything, should not want, let it all become. Then the women. Before this I had never beaten about the bush. They just weren’t important enough to me. All too easy, when women pop up, to go idyllic, or psychological, or private; they sterilise the epic. You must treat them in a different way if you want to draw them into your epic. You have to defang them, demolish all that is sweet, self-important, catty, interesting about them. The true Female is what’s left over. No longer the solitary Outsider-thing, but the simple elementary minx, that other human species, the Man-Woman. For you must realise that the woman, unlike those degenerate females who only ‘love’, does other things besides; namely, just like a man, guzzles, drinks, falls ill, is nasty or docile. During the writing I managed mostly to leave women out. I had to guard my male characters from being made ridiculous and silly by them, as generally happens with a ‘loving creature’. Now in connection with my theme, in the emotional space of this work, I had women in my grasp. That wonderful phenomenon, the Female, was there. That manifestation of Nature, Nature as the Female. She was not so different from the male. It was merely a variation of Nature in the context of the Human. It was not clear to me that there could be only Male and Female. There must be a third, a fourth kind. These were the varied species of the later books. The boundaries between Male and Female kept dissolving away from me. But this blurring of boundaries lent an enormous charm to human relationships. I stepped beyond normal / perverse. Its ‘sense’ became clear to me from my underlying feeling. I’ve said enough. I don’t like spending time on old works, partly – as I’ve mentioned – because I’m already somewhere else, and what’s the point of looking backwards. On top of that this latest book is for me something singular, frightening. Does it help anyone, what I’ve said here? I don’t know. All in all you have to learn to see the unfamiliar. A riddle is no longer a riddle after the tenth repetition. The books I write are neither hard nor easy. I provide data – some, it seems, new and strange. How ‘hard’ or ‘easy’ the data are is irrelevant, a private matter. Farewell and a long life, Balladeuse, Marduk, Icelandic volcanoes, Greenland’s glaciers, Venaska, Giants. By our fruits shall you know us. You are all me and not-me. I am glad I’m no voyeur, that I welcomed you like a good host when you came into my house. I never asked you whence and whither. We understood each other by a handshake and a glance, even now, as I show you dear lovely creatures to the door.

END

30

EXCERPTS FROM ALFRED DÖBLIN: WERK UND ENTWICKLUNG (Alfred Döblin: Work and Development) Klaus Müller-Salget (2nd ed.1988)

Introduction: The goal of this work My aim is to counter contradictory clichés of the Protean Döblin and the Never-changing Döblin, and present a view of his actual development. Scholarly essays and monographs have taught me that without an understanding of this development in the context of then-current opinions, justice cannot be done even to single works. It is simply irrelevant to measure the early stories against the Nature-philosophy and aesthetic writings of the late Twenties, or conversely to approach Franz Biberkopf [of Berlin Alexanderplatz] with quotes from Wang Lun, as some scholars have done. The changes in Döblin from late-pubertal despair to his conversion to Catholicism [in 1941] were not strictly ‘necessary’ but, even more certainly, were not based on chance or fickleness. Each step is comprehensible and can be traced. Döblin lived, not in contradictions, but in a polar tension, which in the period he dubbed ‘naturalistic’29 he had to survive and give shape to, intellectually and artistically. One or other pole came to prominence at different times. This being so, and because the earlier and the later Döblin must be understood in the light of the synthesis he achieved in the Twenties, I have placed his philosophical naturalism at the centre of my investigation. […] The concept ‘Expressionism’ is still so unclear that I cannot at present employ it as a useful classifying device. Its current status in Döblin research is indicated by the fact that one writer can call him ‘the one towering writer of narrative fiction from an Expressionist spirit’ while another omits him entirely from a catalogue of Expressionist writers. One writer devotes a major chapter to Döblin in a discussion of the ‘stylistic tendencies in Expressionist prose’, while a study of the development of the Expressionist novella relegates Döblin to bibliographic entries. […] Arguments against the isolated consideration of a single person and his works are easy to find in Döblin’s own writings, in his theories on the interwovenness of everything that exists, and on incomplete individuation. ‘When I take a single individual human, it’s as if I observe a leaf or a finger and propose to describe their nature and development. But they cannot be so described. The branch, the tree, the hand, the animal must be described along with them.’30

29 Döblin: ‘The spirit of the naturalistic age.’ Die neue Rundschau, Dec 1924. 30 Döblin: ‘Epilogue’ (1948)

31

Chapter 1: ‘The Spirit of a Naturalistic Age’ […] Döblin’s essay as a whole is an attack on the critics of civilisation, on the contempt for present times expressed by those of a humanistic education; it eloquently praises technology, which must have greatly puzzled readers of his recent pessimistic Utopia Mountains Oceans Giants [MOG]. In fact Döblin was here correcting one aspect of his novel, a tendency which, he confessed in the essay, had blindsided him. While the novel had shown where an absolutist technology and the resulting antinomy between humans and Nature could lead, Döblin now places technology in a larger context, where it is for him only an incipient expression of that naturalistic spirit he sees emerging from the dissolution of the old Heaven-oriented religion. For the present, he claims, ‘the picture must be one of barbarism, uncertainty and pessimism’; the Spirit is still undeveloped, meaning ‘materialistic or aridly mystical or a residue of wisdom from earlier times or other places’. As imperialism arises alongside technology, he sees it as inevitable that ‘massive wars will erupt in the age of the young natural-technical spirit’. But big cities are no longer denounced, rather they appear as the appropriate body for the new spirit, not anti-natural but an expression of the power of Nature, i.e. the socialising instinct that constitutes that collective being, the Human. The Utopian novel had initially been conceived as a ‘hymn to the city’. Now, as Döblin seeks to relativise the present as a ‘technological preliminary stage’, the tone has become optimistic and self-assured. [… ] Döblin’s conception is largely encapsulated in a phrase responding to a questionnaire about technology in 1929: ‘This spirit will surely come.’ He continually asserts the lack of spirituality in present society, but remains unshakeably of the view that this is a transitional phenomenon, an overreaction to the imbalance of earlier ages. ‘The spiritual consequences of Copernicus have not yet played out.’ […]

Chapter 3: Peripeteia: Mountains Oceans Giants Once Wallenstein was completed [in 1920], the question of the place of the human in the world became to Döblin ever more pressing. Politically, having abstained in the pre-war years and the debacle of the World War, he sided with the Left, joined the USPD31, and lent his voice to the choir of the disappointed who berated the Weimar Republic for its half-heartedness and alliance with reactionary forces, and in their justified anger either overlooked the first respectable shoots of change or condemned them as inadequate. […] Döblin, as a mere spectator of the political stage, found no solution to his problem in political action. Nevertheless his political demands, along with various others, must have brought him ever more into contradiction with his belief that human beings can do nothing, that everything proceeds of its own accord. If he wanted to cling to this opinion, he would have to acknowledge his polemics as absurd, and retreat to a standpoint of fatalism. But for him, one of the most active of Weimar literati, this was impossible, and the doctrine of submission to whatever Fate laid out revealed itself ever more clearly as what it had always been: a jerry-built structure intended to hold at bay the fear of an

31 Independent Social Democratic Party, which splintered from the SPD in 1916.

32 over-mighty ‘world’ and to make one’s own impotence appear rational. This fatalistic aspect had always been confronted by an insistence on the intrinsic value of the individual, and the Utopian novel is the battleground where this contradiction is settled. a) ‘Anti-critical’ It is today almost considered good form to refer dismissively to this book (usually adding an intrusive comma to the title), citing its ‘rocky’ or ‘stony’ language, pronouncing verdicts such as ‘Here a vision triumphs which … mineralises even the narrator’s language’ – whatever that may mean. Heinz Graber, in contrast, has pointed to the stylistic connections between this despised novel and the generally applauded epic Manas.32 The verdict of ‘stony soullessness’ reveals nothing but the critic’s own occidental and anthropocentric world view. For many passages in the novel rise to the heights of hymnic adulation – not of human beings, admittedly, but of Nature, the sun, the ocean and rivers. Read for example the first section of Part 9, the depiction of the Rhone, sentences that attest to a thoroughly felt empathy with the ‘career’ of this great water-body. To see in this a ‘cold glorification of anonymous Nature’ is sheer prejudice. Setting aside the fact that critics who speak of ‘soullessness’ confuse the emotion with its object, they always begin with the one-sided assertion that here Döblin’s reverence for Nature, his front-line position against human beings, had reached its apogee. This is not wrong, but the book at the same time contains the countervailing tendency: it […] also bears witness to the new view of the value of the individual. That this has been overlooked until now is not surprising, given the glib remarks of various critics that the novel is ‘hardly enjoyable to read today’ and ‘almost unreadable’; here too their prejudices have relieved the critics of more intensive engagement. MOG is no doubt Döblin’s most uncontrolled book, an ‘eruption of phantasy’; it combines almost all the strengths and weaknesses of the writer Döblin, threatens in Part 4 to become bogged down and lose itself in details, only then in Parts 6, 7 and 8, in a breathtaking escalation that ever and again out-trumps the preceding events, to arrive at the most exciting pages in all of Döblin’s prose. We meet enthralling depictions, linguistic treasures – and side by side we find [in Part 3] borrowings from bad historical novels (“Angelelli, you know Castel. The woman’s bluffing. All she can hang over us is her wretched matriarchy”) or with Expressionistic extravagance (Marke’s entrance). Astonishingly clairvoyant predictions stand in remarkable contrast to reminders of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: the institution of senates and consuls, the retention of horses as a means of transport, a totally false estimation of Asian developments, and an already stupid folklore (“huge wide-trousered Russians”). But one must not forget that Döblin, unlike Jules Verne for example, intended to present, not a realistic preview of future technological possibilities, but rather a symbolic picture of the development of European humanity assuming that its basic attitudes remain unchanged. He unmasks this attitude as Gigantomania; later he will speak of “Prometheanism”33.

32 Heinz Graber: Alfred Döblins Epos ‘Manas’. Berne 1967. 33 Döblin’s 1938 essay ‘Prometheus and the Primitive’, here in English , also here .

33

This book, so packed with contradictions, was felt by its author to be so sinister in its rampant autonomous life that he saw himself compelled to send it on its way with an explanatory essay which served to clarify, less for the reader than for the author, what was going on here.34 For during the writing, the original conception had turned into its opposite; and the revolt of the Ego remained defeated by the attitude of the Chinese novel and Wallenstein: ‘the impotence of human power.’ b) Origination and philosophical background The holiday on the Baltic coast in summer 1921 was even more significant than Linke Poot, Döblin’s alter ego, was prepared to admit. He had intended on his return to Berlin to shout out, like a Xenophon in reverse, ‘Thalassa, thalassa!’ But now we learn that: ‘For the first time, really for the first time, I hesitated, no, was reluctant to return to Berlin, to that city of buildings, machines, masses of humanity, which otherwise I clung fast to. I had a desire to stay longer in free Nature and let these things, for once, play around me.’ Linke Poot focused on the humdrum bathing resort, while the author of the ‘Remarks’ speaks of ‘free’ Nature, of the deep impression made on him by a few stones, ‘ordinary pebbles’. Nature, already in the background of Wang Lun and the last chapter of Wallenstein, was for the first time really experienced, an object for research. There followed the essays ‘Buddha and Nature’, ‘Nature and its souls’, and ‘Water’, which later, with minimal revisions, made their way into his book Das Ich über der Natur. The tenor of these essays was defined by the author later as “I – am – not.” And in truth, the rejection of individuality finds here its sharpest expression. ‘The personal Ego cannot be maintained. Death clings to the personal Ego.’ And: ‘Only in anonymity do we have Life and Truth.’ At the same time nature is no longer the annihilating unfathomable Other: clouds, mountains, oceans, deserts, forests are beings with soul, i.e. they have specific characteristics, reactions and functions; humans are no different: ‘The human soul is nothing more than the nature of the human.’ Already in the Foreword to his play The Nuns of Kemnade we have: ‘This world: colourful and at the same time – what a secret – soulful. A cataract of Egos.’ Admittedly there is the sentence: ‘And so the Ego in nature is frail and null, but the discovery of nature-with-a-soul allows the overwhelming to appear at the same time familiar and fraternal: Salts, acids, hydrogen, carbon, liquids, solids, electric currents – these are me. I bow to their souls, from them I come, they are my fatherland, my maternal home. This is my patriotism.”35 […] So despair at a chaotic world has weakened to a sense of reverence for a cosmos with soul, to that uncomplaining subordination […] that speaks in the Dedication. […] At least, so it seems at first. In the ‘Remarks’ we read that originally the novel was to have the exact opposite tendency: ‘I wanted the present day. Something sharp. Active against Nature’s “happening”. Myself vs. my nullity.’ Hence resistance, and the urge to assert himself against the over-mighty and bring himself to fruition. With this in mind Döblin first wrote the Greenland venture; his plan was: ‘Epic and hymns. Hymns to the city.’

34 Döblin ‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants’, Die neue Rundschau, June 1924. 35 ‘Buddha and Nature’.

34

Already in 1919 he was heading in this direction with his [Linke Poot] essay ‘On Spirituality’, which reads in part like advance commentary on MOG: ‘For some centuries we face the industrialising of the world by electricity, steam and all the other steel apparatus, unconcerned for the consequences. Nothing will turn us aside. As time goes by we shall see what we have wrought.’ And: ‘Simultaneously with the pooling of humanity comes an increased possibility of mass struggles, a probability that weaker groups will be subjugated; the concentration of power in ever fewer hands will reach a monstrous degree. Rebellions will break out, in general a hard cunning human type will evolve to rule, which eventually experiences its downfall This belief in progress evaporated as the researches into Nature proceeded, and the novel would not let itself be forced in this direction. After finishing the Greenland chapter, Döblin stated: ‘The strongest weapon I had raised against this heavy chest-tightening concept was of no use. I myself was engaged in the Theme: human strength vs. Nature’s power, the impotence of human strength.’ Now, he continued, his feelings regarding Nature had lost their oppressive character: ‘As I wrote I found that the way I felt about the secret had changed. I found myself facing a secure, strong power that demanded expression, and my novel had a specific task: to praise the World Being.’36 Döblin dates the change to May 1922; the Dedication was composed then. But the feeling also dominated the 1921 essay ‘Buddha and Nature’, so we must envisage a more complex development than Döblin presents. Clearly his basic feeling was ambiguous, vacillating between reverential subjection and proud assertion. But in the years to 1924 Döblin was too strongly fixated on the ‘Nature-Ego’ to be credibly capable of opposing the fundamental sense of subjection; for as a being in Nature the human is not in fact entitled to arrogance, but rather is weak and frail. That the ambiguity of those years nevertheless also finds expression in the novel, and that it is in no way a ‘comforting and celebratory song to the great Mother Powers’, we shall explore below. [There follow 15 pages under topic headings ‘Soulful Nature and the collapse of the technological impulse’; ‘The significance of individual fates’; ‘Attempt at a synthesis: Kylin’; ‘Stylistic rampancy’; and ‘Narrator’s voice’.] Conclusion to Chapter 3 Döblin’s work before the naturalistic turn in no way forms a homogenous unity, but for all its diversity in form and content is characterised by a common fundamental tendency: rejection of the European belief in the sovereign individual, and the suffering and latterly laudatory depiction of over-mighty powers that have humanity at their mercy. We have seen how for a short time Döblin, irritated by Marinetti’s egocentricity and annoyed by the labelling of his work as ‘Expressionist’, reclaimed originality and autonomy at least for the artist Döblin, but then brought his theories of art and the novel into line with his philosophical pessimism, and sought to sideline the Ego as fictional hero and as narrator. His experience of poverty and exclusion, his insight into the restructuring of society following the Industrial Revolution, his medical – especially

36 ‘Remarks…’

35 psychiatric – knowledge of human frailty, and finally his anger at the predominance of ‘private’ problems in contemporary literature: all can be considered as the main motifs of those concepts that determined Döblin’s thinking for a quarter of a century. […] Among Nietzsche’s works he was impressed not so much by Zarathustra as by The Genealogy of Morals – hence not the proclaiming of the New Human but the destruction of the old seemingly so secure standards. Just as clearly as the rejection of the personal Ego is foregrounded, we can discern Döblin’s protest, now gentle, now more insistent, against his own stance. His interest in details was too strong – including the detail of the ‘individual human’ – and he himself was too original to stick permanently with humble self-effacement. Hence the so varied faces of his writings of this earlier period. […] Corresponding to Döblin’s uneasy questioning is the experimental structure of the writing, which rests on the principle of varied repetition […] This allows for a step-by- step clarification of the initial conflict, but can also strengthen the insight that no solution is possible on the given premise, since every attempt arrives at the same result. The motif of repetition, which extends from the overall structure down to the repetitions of words and sounds, in its ‘natural’ primitiveness is highly variable; it allows for the representation of heightening as well as fading, the stressing of similarities as well as contraries, and in this sense is one of the means of indirect communication Döblin developed in parallel with the wide-ranging exclusion of a personal narrator. Here we recall once again the virtuoso use of paragraphing and the marked formation of symbols – especially in Wang Lun and MOG – which enable the commenting narrator to be discerned. On the other hand we have the very marked point de vue technique, which depicts methods, events and characters from the perspectives of other people, providing the reader with nothing but these relativistic judgements. […] Particularly in MOG, Döblin’s phrase is valid: ‘Let the reader judge, not the author.’37 The intention to direct all light away from the narrator and onto the reported action is also the basis for developing such a rich toolkit for reproducing a character’s speech or thoughts: avoidance of ‘he said’; direct and indirect speech and stages in between; ways of introducing speech; and the variability of actual speech and interior monologue. The desire to make every action as lively as possible and eliminate unnecessary verbiage leads to reduced syntax, beginning with the omission of conjunctions, then of subjects or predicates, and ending in breathless lists. The tendency to reduction is also seen in the cumulated participles and verbs that arise from melding with objects and adverbial clauses, or in comparisons. The suggestive effects of the matter being represented are enhanced finally by the extensive use of alliteration and the sometimes very ambitious rhythmising. END

37 Döblin: ‘To novelists and their critics’.

36

WHY I DECIDED TO ABRIDGE DÖBLIN’S GREAT BUT FLAWED DYSTOPIA C.D. Godwin (2019)

In ‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants', Döblin recounts the mental turmoil that drove him to engage with these dystopian themes. He describes how the initial stimulus – a specific episode of high imagination (Mutumbo's fleet digging themselves into the sea) – broadened to the intensely-imagined Iceland-Greenland venture and its aftermath. Had Döblin kept faith with the power of his imagination, he might have published Parts 6 - 9 as an already-complete novel, giving us an indisputable masterpiece to join the other major dystopias produced in Europe between the wars by Zamyatin, Wells, Huxley, Stapledon, for example. And then every literate person would have at least passing knowledge of one other Döblin work besides Berlin Alexanderplatz. But the strain of an overheated imagination caused Döblin to recoil, to step back. And now he sketched a coolly rational plan for depicting how humanity had arrived at the 27th century world. The earlier parts contain several powerful episodes (Melise of Bordeaux, the Urals War, Marduk’s trees, Synthetic Food), but Döblin acknowledges how his material kept running away with him: ‘everything I touched on was at risk of growing into an entire book’. For unlike his approach to the writing of his first two epics (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, and Wallenstein), where his imagination was both fired and constrained by copious historical and factual material, in composing his Dystopia he had no anchor other than whatever Ghostly Editor watches over a writer at work. Parts 3 and 4 as written may deter the reader from persevering to the powerful later parts which are the most exciting pages in all of Döblin’s prose (see Müller-Salget, above). In Parts 3 and 4 Döblin becomes tangled in two emotional triangles: strange, given his firmly stated views on the craft of fiction (‘I am an enemy of the personal. It’s nothing but swindle and lyricism. The epic has no use for individual persons and their so-called fate.’) While scholars continue to explore the significance of the Marduk- Jonathan-Balladeuse and Jonathan-Elena-Marduk storylines in the context of Döblin’s overall life, philosophy and career, the general reader is unlikely to have such patience. Fortunately, the Internet allows interested readers to find the excised passages online , if they so wish.

A friendly suggestion Reader, why not approach Mountains Oceans Giants in the order of its composition? Start with Part 6, and read through to the end of Part 9. Only then start back at the beginning, equipped with the experience you have gained of Döblin’s style, voice, and ways of world-creation.

END

37

INTRODUCING DÖBLIN’S MOST NEGLECTED WORK –

MANAS An epic in verse (1927)

38

THE VANISHED MASTERPIECE C.D. Godwin

Lots of books shine briefly, only to end unmourned in the remainder bin. Some books have legs, remain in print for decades. Helped by college reading lists, perhaps, or because they persist in resonating with the reading public. A few books acquire a mystical reputation: out of print, hard to find, but rumoured to be something special. The fate of Manas corresponds to none of these. Not many other works of true literary worth and interest have been so studiously ignored and neglected for almost a century after they first appeared. Passed over even in comprehensive bibliographies. Unexplored by scholars of literature. Utterly unknown to Anglophone editors and reviewers, let alone the interested reader. It really is remarkable how little attention Germanist scholars have paid to Manas. Only one substantial study has appeared so far38, and that over 50 years ago. Whatever may have appeared in English is buried in obscure scholarly journals. When the very nice new Fischer Klassik edition of Manas (2016) was being prepared, the editor, David Midgley, was told by the publishers that they didn’t expect it to sell. Yet when it first appeared in 1927, leading German writers wrote long enthusiastic reviews, while noting that readers fed on the standard fare of the 1920s German book trade might find it hard going. Robert Musil even hoped it might arouse controversy. Instead – nothing. Deafening silence. And Sam Fischer stopped Döblin’s monthly stipend. Then two years later Döblin’s only international best-seller, Berlin Alexanderplatz was published Overnight, that became the only work by which he would henceforth be known. A whole industry sprang up to discuss that book, while the rest of his enormous output attracted only sporadic attention. Except for Manas. Manas attracted as good as no attention at all. This leaves me with the delicate task of encouraging you to read this wonderful work. Ignored by the critics? you say; Can’t be much good then. Not so, I urge: take the taste test! Sample some of the Notable Passages highlighted in the Introduction. Savour the language, the sounds, the moods and voices. (This is a text for the ears, not just the eyes.) Blank verse! you say. That’s a hurdle, for a start. Not so, I promise. There’s nothing complicated or ‘hard’ about the crisp, direct, powerfully dramatic format Döblin chose for Manas. (Nothing here of the chaotic noisy word-montage of the Berlin novel!) Overcome your fear of ‘poetry’! Find delight in the vigour, the vivid scenes, the voices

38 Heinz Graber: Alfred Döblin’s Epos ‚Manas‘ (Bern, 1967).

39 human, divine, demonic, the constantly surprising actions and mood-shifts. You’ll keep wondering: whatever next? As I translated Manas I imagined it as a graphic novel, a stage play, a film – Bollywood film, even! Once I’d finished, I adapted it as a radio play, incorporating about a third of the full text along with a synopsis and other navigation aids. You can download Manas – a Play for Voices for free.39 (If you belong to an AmDram group, why not encourage a group reading?) I hope the commentaries by Heinz Graber, Robert Musil and others below will attune you to this wonderful work, and encourage a buzz in the Anglosphere that will at last allow Manas to receive its just deserts alongside Gilgamesh, Homer, Dante, Byron, Pushkin, Walcott, and other examples of the verse-novel genre.

END

39 https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/manas-a-himalayan-epic .

40

ON THE STYLE OF MANAS Heinz Graber40

That Döblin at several times in his career was preoccupied with the nature of the Epic is shown by some of his most important essays on literature. The very first of these critiques which interweave theory and practice asserts in 1913 that “The novel must be reborn as a work of art and a modern epic.” [‘Berliner Programme’] This assertion emerges from what had long been seen as a crisis in the novel. Döblin’s aim to overcome this crisis drove him ever more fanatically to pursue de-personation, which he called the ‘stony’ style. An exact report, anchored in strict lifeless reality and never venturing beyond so-called objectivity, appeared to be the only way to rescue the process of novel- writing from pernicious rationalism, psychologism, and eroticism. The path from Wang Lun [written 1912/1913] via Wadzek [1914] and Wallenstein [1918-1919] ends in the Utopian Mountains Oceans Giants [1923]. Over the following 20 years Döblin’s concept of the epic acquires a new, much sharper edge. Again he urges the ‘renaissance and regeneration’ of the epic, e.g. in his important 1929 lecture The Structure of the Epic Work.41 Here it no longer sounds merely programmatic, rather the author speaks from direct experience. And there is a particular example from this period, sadly neglected, where Döblin, mistrusting all polite forms of narrative convention inherited from the bourgeois tradition of the novel, reverts to an elementary stage of narrative art. I refer to the verse epic Manas (1927). Robert Musil judged this work ‘as daring as it is successful, as extraordinary as it is surprising.’42 But the hopes he placed in it for ‘the development of our literature’ failed to materialise. Indeed, the work even failed to arouse the opposition Musil expected. To show definitively how unknown this work remained until the new edition of 1961, we may cite the astonishing fact that there are comprehensive handbooks which list every major work of Döblin, but omit this, dubbed his ‘greatest poetical shot.’ Hence Walter Muschg in his Afterword to the republished Manas: ‘If it is in fact possible today to bring to its rightful place a German literary creation of the highest rank, then the hour has arrived for this wonderful work.’ Employing a strict framework, the book is divided into three almost autonomous parts, in each of which are three major more or less self-contained episodes. Part One is prefaced by a Prelude. The schema is visible in capital letters at the start of each section. Each section contains an irregular number of scenes. That the author had the model of ancient epics in mind is shown by a handwritten designation ‘First Canto’. Döblin’s original plan seems to have been to divide the work into ‘cantos’. This reveals a problem which occupied him at this time: how to liberate the epic work from the book. His efforts to this end, sometimes through stage plays, once through a radio play,

40 In Text+Kritik 13/14 [November 1972], pp 45-56. 41 Unless otherwise marked, all quotations below are from this essay. 42 Review in Berliner Tageblatt, June 1927.

41 are fundamental. For this born narrator perceived the book as ‘the death of real language. The epicist who only writes foregoes the most important formative strengths of language.’ If the epic could not be freed from the book, the same is true of literary language, novelistic prose. Hence the rhapsodic style of Manas. Only the three Parts are labelled. Their titles indicate what will befall the main characters: ‘The Field of Death’, ‘Savitri’, and ‘Manas Returns’. We can see the course of the fable in these. […] Döblin writes in Epilog [1948]: I came across… a travelogue from India with lots of pictures and many stories. The milieu was unfamiliar to me, and was fantastically, tropically rich. I became absorbed in the reports of Hinduism, of Shiva the god, a realm of the dead. I saw someone penetrate there, someone from our world, who wants to be lacerated by the misery he finds in this world of the dead. He wants to take upon himself all the sorrows of our world, because he knows (from his experience of war) that we are all one and the same, brothers, the slayer and the slain, the executioner and his victim. He dares to make this terrible journey, and collapses. But Savitri his wife (she is a goddess, divine love) raises him up, and he returns as a new man, a demigod. The collapse at the end of his terrible journey is his end as a human; his raising up by a goddess is his rebirth; and the ensuing return is life as a demigod. How that man became this is the core of the story. The whole work is a coming-of-age story: this is explicit. As Döblin saw it, every epic involved Becoming: becoming not merely the object, but the entire essence: In every epic work of substantial scope, one must realise that it is not a rounded, closed- off, completely sorted work of art, rather one participates in the creation of the work, its development and growth, in contrast to the decorative arts and probably some dramatic productions. But even those have at least something of this, and not the worst aspects. The same goes for great works of the other contemporary art, music: themes develop from one another not in a merely musical way, but in real time, they come into existence only now. In short: ‘the reader joins with the writer in the process of production.’ The epic work is a work of language. This should mean that language is employed not so much as a ready-made fabric, but rather as a ‘formative power, a productive force’ […] Insofar as the epic is a work being born, this will show itself most clearly in its language. In its drive from sentence to sentence, period to period, in the growth of its epic oratory, the growth of its epic action must become tangible. ‘In the epic, the action grows through layering….’ Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in the steps by which Manas builds his phrases: ‘How long must I stand, How long must I stand at the window, How long must I stand here at this window, How long must I stand at this pale hateful window of glass,

42

And I have to listen to you, Listen hour upon hour upon hour.’ Here is the model on which the whole work is built. The three books are layered one on the other in just the same way. As on the small scale one line is layered upon another, so on the large scale scene is layered upon scene in accordance with the principle of epic composition: direct narrative, repetitions e.g. ‘hour upon hour upon hour’. In fact, he ‘sings like a stammerer: repeating every word over. When he has sung a chorus he repeats the verse and starts over again.’43 […] Which is how the verses of Manas are ‘sung’. In this work, where the action deals with suffering, the reporting often becomes a torment, causing speech to break off before the end and start again: Manas laid low there on the Field, Laid low on the Field of the Dead, As he wandered, laid low. The speaker cannot complete the utterance at the first attempt. His breath has been taken, he has to repeat. And if the language holds back, the speech process too is interrupted: something we have all experienced under heightened emotions. And this should be enough to show us, if we did not already know it: the speech-rhythms of this work and its verses – free of every rule, unbounded, irrepressible – follow the laws of living speech; ‘real breathing in, breathing out, the cadence of pitch according to the sense, these construct the sentence and the sequence of sentences.’ This appeal to orality, the reality of speaking itself, reveals the narrator to us. His voice is no different from those of the characters, which suggests that he resides in them. And really he does not remain a spectator outside the play, content merely to report on it, but is carried away and enters into the story. The author experiences the developing work; and the reader, participating in the production process, is entitled to glean, from the way it is presented, information about the narrator’s attitude. The reader thereby sees that the analysis itself is a symptom of the highly problematic position of the modern epicist, fully aware of the anachronism of his task, lamenting the printed book and jealous of his ancestor, the wandering minstrel with his direct connection to an audience. The original epic situation, requiring both a narrator and one who listens, in the absence of the latter is thrown back entirely onto the author. ‘I am the public, become a listener, actually a participant listener.’ But: ‘The conscious Ego does not always stay at the level of the public, the audience, the participants; instead it loses its guiding stance towards the work and puts on masks, it suffers the work, dances around it.’ This experience of the Ego with the work is even expressed overtly, in the passage where Puto and Manas are flying to the Field, where the power which as a storm first drives clouds and then Manas ‘hither and down’ seizes even the narrator: Buoyed on thin mist, Puto and Manas, Impelled by billows, Air foaming, awash with light,

43 Berlin Alexanderplatz, p.415 in the new translation (2018).

43

Ripplerustlerush, And on, directly on, blown on, Into the glimmerflitter, into the cooing tugtwitch. Here, where the language threatens to disintegrate, the Ego which has so far not been discernible raises its voice to interrupt and have the last word:

O twitching heart that sings this, whither are you dragging me. Why bundle me up, bind me and haul me along as if in an animal’s hide, And I falter and must follow and am bound and must go along Even to my dissolution. This appeal to the heart, as a demon tearing away the overwhelmed man, reveals the pathos of the whole work, and also the concept of what the author means by Dichten (poetising, condensing language): ‘E.g. let oneself go, play, e.g. have the courage to submit to inner enchantments, and sacrifice oneself to them formally and in substance.’ The narrator’s fascination makes the enthralling style of the scene comprehensible and permits the laws of representation to be suspended. There is first of all Immediacy, and the corresponding modes of expression: Ellipsis, Inversion, Parataxis: syntactic forms that spring from feeling, passion, emotion. Even the narrator is carried away, and his representation of this removes the distinction between story and story-teller. The characters usually speak for themselves, in direct speech (very rarely in indirect speech), in unmediated dialogue, in so-called ‘inner monologue’ (sometimes better seen as ‘monologue of the internal’), where it is clear that this itself, and not a Subject, is speaking. Often it is simply a general feeling, a mood, that reveals itself, and its indeterminacy is served by verbless nouns or verbs in the infinitive: And sorrow, joy, yes yes to everything And lie flat, stand up, see it all, be there. The frequent dialogue passages in Manas read more like a stage play than an epic. ‘The writer remains totally invisible. He acts and speaks through two or three characters and their interactions. He does not intervene directly, but in order to express himself he sets Heaven and Hell in motion. He works behind the scenes.’ But when he interrupts a dialogue with a comment, he does so with a terseness that reads like a stage direction: ‘And Manas, helmet flung from him, chain mail on the floor…’ This helps the reader visualise the scene, but could also work as directions to an actor. This impression is supported by Döblin’s deep understanding of how close the representational style of epic poetry is to the drama. His principle: ‘The epic does not relate the past, but presents the now.’ Recall the signature quality of an epic poem: ‘For every reader of an epic, actions happen at the moment they are reported, the reader experiences them in real time, regardless of tense – present, perfect, imperfect – in the epic we represent things just as immediately, and they are taken in just as immediately, as in a play. … All representation is in the present, however it may be conveyed formally.’ Immediacy of representation means enabling us to visualise to the highest degree. All distance is lost between narrator and action, to the extent that even the narrator

44 sometimes cannot catch his breath: he is like a messenger rushing in with a despatch and capable only of uttering the message in jerky fragments: The great gates, the city opened up. Into the streets, the bedlam of humanity. Scorching streets. Humped white oxen, cart, Manas under shrouding cloths, Laid low by demons. Even a report, the basic form of the epic narrative, can appear in the kind of fragmentary form normally associated with spiritual turmoil: in the immediacy of an internal monologue not of a character, note, but of the narrator. The reality he reports is expressly that of a dream, and since for him, as he seems to speak directly from his sleep, there seems to be no public, so he has no need to turn his ellipses into logical well- formed speech. The monomania of this style might lead one to the concept, paradoxical as it may be, of a monologic epic. The immediacy of representation shows itself perhaps more clearly in its representation of pure reflexes and sudden reactions, where a word fails and a gesture has to speak for it. For where words fail and before understanding comes, the gesture has to serve, e.g. when Savitri is woken up, listens: Then clapped a hand to her mouth. Because because because That groaning, roaring: it is Manas. Manas roaring. Dying Manas. The first word before the identification, standing in the way of it, cannot at first be uttered: the narrator has to say it three times. As if the shock is in the narrator’s own limbs and speech, and he himself makes the involuntary hand to mouth gesture of the startled woman. In this way the speech of a narrator who dons masks sometimes gives the impression that it wants to remove the distinction between a narrated action and the act of narration. It is common to speak of narrative perspective, and within this the stance from which the narrator, like a painter, makes his representation. Let us make a short diversion into the territory from which this terminology derives: one of the Futurist pictures described by Döblin for the readers of Der Sturm during the 1912 exhibition in Berlin: Look at this picture by Boccioni: The Laugh. The painter dancers like a drunkard around a woman’s hat; he keeps returning to the hat, viewed from above, the right, the left, aslant, upright. The painter isn’t content just with the reflective marble tabletop that wanders like a Leitmotif through all the dash and vigour of the painting; and ever and again two hands hold a flame to a cigarette. It betrays a constant shifting of perspective. A single object fixed in a single position and viewpoint has become a plurality. The simultaneity in which they appear side by side in

45

the picture reveals them as different phases of a sequence through time, a movement through space […] The merely imagined movement of the painter corresponds to that of the author who, ‘drawn into the play situation of the developing work’ also seems to dance. One sign of this is in both cases Repetition. The changes of perspective give viewer of this picture a sense of an insatiable desire for repetition. And so, in Manas, words, lines, whole sequences of lines, seem to enthral the writer: they recur in varied forms through all the vim and vigour of the work. The work, when looked at closely, consists of an uninterrupted succession of these variations and as a whole and in detail presents an organic growth, a braid: the structure of ‘living language, which is not the language of philology and the lexicon. Rather a blooming, concrete phenomenon, does not know any “words” any more than the world knows single objects, flows in words and sentences, evocative and thought-filled, experienced and deeply felt.’ Words and phrases repeated either at once or at a distance appear in the stream of lines like waves that carry them on a little farther, only to vanish, sink, some to disappear for good. ‘Now and then the laws of rhythm come to the fore, now and then alliteration seems to take the lead, now and then consonances. The ideal on this level struggles with the language at that level. The victor – if the author is a good one – is always “language”.’ Here the author has described himself, in particular in relation to Manas. Here we see the Compulsion of which Döblin has spoken since the start of his creative life and which imparts its productivity. The sonority of language dominates, and this, rather than the logical power of understanding, creates the connections between words and links them together. Language proceeds for stretches autonomously, down its own path, dragging the author along on a leash of sound-associations. ‘In this

46 way the author appears as an appendage to that mighty Language perpetuating the spirit of generations. […] Language tolerates nothing individual.’44 The same could be said of the world it represents: ‘The world is not decomposed into individuals. The individual does not become truly individual, but remains linked to the commonality of the world. There is only incomplete individuation.’45 And every work of Döblin’s shows in its own way that the individual as an isolate is lost. Such a conception has its stylistic correlatives. One individualising element in language is the Article: this delimits and isolates its referent. The MS of Manas shows how the author removed this delimiting by striking out articles at certain points, whereby the named entity is removed to a sphere that lies before or behind tangible clarity. The following passage demonstrates this: every substantive appears twice, once with the Article, once without. The old King was not asleep. He sat beneath a tamarind. From across the pool the water-ouzel sang. And without a word he heard what Puto brought. The silver gateway, silver gateway lost its sheen. The glitter on the water, glitter faded. Ouzel started up again. His voice a breath… The frequent inversion of subject and predicate in Manas is, as the MS shows, not always just a transposition but follows the removal of a conjunction, and often the removal of a dummy ‘it’ or ‘there’: Dead man lying there, Dreadfully dreadfully scarred by demons. Where the subject is clear, the pronoun can be left unexpressed. Word positions are highly variable, and in line with the dreamlike world of this story undergo further variation […] Where the scenery takes precedence, it appears first: But through the green walls, from far away Rang out a clashing and smashing, Slamming and hitting. In extreme cases the subject appears only at the very end of a sentence: ‘On the cart, under shrouding cloths, white flowers, Manas.’ Or: ‘Rocking, rocking in the hot air, bright sun, Chanda rocked himself’, where the syntax holds in suspense the action only subsequently depicted. The sentence structure in this highly perspectival narrative corresponds exactly to requirements of the given situation. […] The loosening of the syntactic framework can be seen in the predicate, which typically appears as a bare participle, the least definite of the verb forms after the infinitive. In Manas this is the preferred form of the verb: ‘Skidding down in snow, Savitri, set free now.’ Sometime even the predicate in such a rudimentary form falls away, as if the narrator finds it too circumstantial for the most immediate expression:

44 The last sentence from ‘Literary creation: its nature and role.’ 1950 45 Döblin: Unser Dasein [‘Our Existence’] 1933.

47

‘Sunlight bright on him’. The MS originally included ‘fell’ in this line. Such shortenings accelerate the narrative, which often seeks to compete with the speed of the events narrated. The seeming barbarity of this reduced syntax makes inroads into language itself and generates word forms that substitute for sentence structures and in which several processes are brought together, accumulated: ‘he stammersobs’, ‘his breast rose-sank’. […] The word becomes a word-complex, regardless of grammar. For the Expressionist, such as Döblin nowhere more clearly than in Manas showed himself to be, protested against grammar itself. To the charge that such word-technique was violent and forced, he might reply: ‘Philology is too much like speech-anatomy, dissected into a speech-corpse, and not enough speech-physiology, a biology of language.’ We might term these Expressionist word-connections as an organic chemistry of speech. In a speech world which ‘knows no individual objects’, words, even sentences, do not have an autonomy that would allow them to be seen for themselves alone. They must remain in the context to which they belong, leaving it to other elements to show what meaning they should bear in the narrative flow. For only by cutting into the fabric of the text (and it is here a fabric) enables us to examine the concrete structure of a particular passage: Stretched his giant arms out across ravines, And with one hand, one hand Felt across ravines, the snowfield with its rising mists Towards Savitri. With the index finger of one hand Shiva made silent contact with her face, The finger, daubed with paint from his own face, Moved across Savitri’s brow, And with paint from his own face Shiva painted on Savitri’s brow the wedding mark. The movement, which overall seems to be a single one, appears segmented into single moments. The completion of the act is delayed again and again, as if in slow motion or a dream. At each turn the previous turns are referred to, in order gradually, bit by bit, to capture and progress the movement in each of its particularities. The epic content of the depiction is a process of differentiation, achieved here by constant repetition. Which, as here, also serves to retard the flow. Thus Shiva’s ode to the eyes: replete with repetition and deviations. Is this episode not consistent with Döblin’s theory of epic narrative, a diversion made by the author around that on which he has long had his eye and flagged to the reader long before its appearance? The narrative of a journey is an excuse for diversions; its goal, to return to the beginning. Diversion and retracing also shape the rhetorical figures he uses. He feasts on them. Just listen:

When he came down to earth he had Ganesha’s rat-tail with him. When Manas came down to earth, He held Ganesha’s rat-tail in his hand.

48

In his hand he swung Ganesha’s rat-tail, It was five arms long, And swung the tail and cracked it. Flying in the air he cracked it over rooftops, Down on the ground he cracked it against huts. Huts burst and shattered when he cracked the tail. This made Manas happy. The insistent repetition of the same word creates in Manas the epic handhold of a language now dramatically urgent, now lyrically fleeting. The epicist, for all his inclination to verbal shortening, is in no hurry. The gait of that ‘ancient holy turtle’ [Musil], meaning the gait of the epic, shows for all its haste and restlessness frequent delays in its progress. This applies to the structure as a whole as well as to individual passages. Just as words are linked by alliteration and assonance, connected from line to line by parallelisms of every sort, so the reader again and again encounters repeated sections of text he has already seen. Nowhere do the first occurrences remain in the past, but may at any time be quoted and brought into the present. Such widely separated mutually referring sections link substantial parts of the text and create its inner unity. Here is one from a multitude of possible examples: the very first scene, which introduces Manas with such immediacy that no one who reads it for the first time can be clear about its meaning. The first half presents a natural process such as one looks for in any work by Döblin. With astonishing sure-footedness it then at once sets the epic-elevated tone of the whole work. In the second half the depiction of a natural process is revealed as a depiction of the Field of the Dead. The first scene at first stands on its own; the following scene makes no reference to it. But a few pages later it is quoted almost exactly, separated by a dash from the preceding text. Only now do we see its significance: this is the boundary of the Field of the Dead. Whenever the boundary is reached, this scene is referenced again, e.g. in Book 2, but here in only a few lines. No more are needed to identify the place. In Book 3, where Manas is carried away from the Field, the first lines of Book 1 return again. Aiming for closure, the work reverts to the start. This principle of composition appears also in particular parts of the work, e.g. in the last third of Book 2. The first scene begins ‘Resplendent, Mount Kailash.’ The next scene: ‘Mount Kailash resplendent.’ And thirty pages later: ‘And Kailash resplendent, loud with jubilation’. A hundred pages farther on, again at the start of a scene: ‘Resplendent, Kailash high in icy Himavat.’ Such places are waymarks, topoi, fixed points of reference in the landscape of the work, comparable to the formulaic phrases of ancient epics. But as recurrences their binding power appears within specific scenes, e.g. the first two lines of the work: There was no more rain. Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down …

49

The second sentence is not yet completed, not by a long shot. It carries the motion of the storm across the next fourteen lines and comes to rest only when the beginning is recapitulated: ‘Storms shredded the black clouds away, / Howled.’ Here we may speak of the broader significance of the physical phenomenon of Resonance in Döblin’s works. In [his philosophical work] Unser Dasein, it is described as ‘a universal power of Nature’. ‘Resonance is like putty, it works to allow like to connect with like. At the same time it is a kind of dowsing rod, because it discovers similarities and goes beyond them: it strengthens similarities.’ [p.172] This points to numerous motifs in Manas. The characters, notably Savitri, seem to possess such a dowsing rod. Here we can only allude to the author’s inclination to ‘repeat the same’ as an ‘urge to resonance’. Resonance, in its many guises in the system of signifiers, is the mark of an identity. This, the core of all relationships, forms the centre of a magical world in which everything has a soul and everything belongs to everything else. This is the world of Manas. The high point of the work is its giving a voice to identity: its name is ‘I’ and means that generalised ‘I’ which at the end of his journey is recognised by the individual, namely Manas. Almost at the same time as Manas, Döblin published Das Ich über der Natur [Ego above Nature]. The title already announces what is celebrated in Manas: the triumph over Nature, under whose spell Döblin’s previous works, in particular MOG, have lain. The spell is broken in Manas. Only in the intellectually bold conception of this work could Döblin extend stylistic features already alluded to in his remarks on MOG in 1924: In some respects this [MOG] was a peculiar book for me. Its style, for one. Normally I relish concision, objectivity. Here I was unable to resist impulses of a purely linguistic kind. It went wide and colourful. It was as if everything wanted to be autonomous, and I had to be on my guard. The lofty plane of several parts, their solemn hymn-like character, contributed to this. I also confess I had the feeling I was no longer in the region of my own prose or normal prose, in the purely linguistic. Where the journey’s going I don’t know. The old verse-forms seem to me impossible. You shouldn’t force anything, should not want, let it all become.

END

50

CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF MANAS (three positive, one negative)

1. Robert Musil, Berliner Tageblatt, 10 June 1927 In the midst of victory an Indian prince and army commander, depicted as a legendary hero, is lamed by a slight stroke at the sight of death and sorrow. All desires become fixed on one murky need: to visit the realm of the dead, from which no mortal can escape. The bitter taste of melancholy is fixed on his tongue. He persuades his tutor Puto, coercer of demons and one of the powers on Shiva’s mountain, to take him there. The Field of the Dead lies on the Himalayan slopes at the feet of the gods. There the souls of the departed lead a dreadful helpless existence and are chased like snowflakes by demons. As Manas becomes overwhelmed by this experience, he and his tutor are deceived by demons. Manas dies and stays behind in the horrors of death. But Savitri, his favourite wife, instead of letting herself be burned on the pyre, sets out to search for him. Her adventures fill the second part of the epic. At last she gives her beloved back his life, but goes herself to the gods, for she is divine, and has only been wandering from Shiva’s mountain. A part of her power remains with Manas through the mysterious union of love. Born again, he is himself half-divine. Companion of demons, swollen with life, victor over horrors and death, he hurtles back into the soft vapidity of existence, arrogantly sweeps aside whatever he meets, and defeats gods. He is now in a state of heightened activity, such as we normally see only in madhouses: boundaries, the highest peaks of active will, suspended vertically over the abyss of absurdity. But in the end he is again overcome, this time not by sorrow or cunning or any other experience from the ranks of those that demean our feelings, but by Shiva himself, the Flower- footed World-shaker, the Blue-throated Archer and Dancer. Somehow: not defeated, but overcome; I leave aside whatever that may mean, for the intellect and its explanatory possibilities seem to me not what is meaningful in this book; which is rather the force that drives ahead torn free of all inhibition, the great surge of the underlying sense of our existence between manic excess and depression that streams through it, pulling along a relentless cornucopia of experiences. With such a work you have to ask first: what is it trying to do? I’ll explain the problem in a few words. We are on good grounds in believing that the Epic as a specific art form is today in the last stages of withering. The imitation mediaeval verse narratives that before the age of realism amused the German drawing-room marked the lowest point. […] The trend has long since transferred to the novel, and if, leaving aside the products of the publishing industry, you stick to the great examples, there you see a development that is not only removed from the Epic, but from the epical, meaning the elements common to the past to which the novel owes gratitude for its acceptance as a kind of civilian version of epic poetry. […] A paradox: today many more bad novels than good ones are literally epic writing. Intelligence, comprehensiveness, flexibility, speed, the

51 capacity to form big pictures without abandoning the hard light of reality – in a word, the Real, the greater and more relevant mental aptness for our time that distinguishes the novel from other forms of writing, all are in this sense un-epical. At the least, as those in the business are aware, the novel today has already been brought to an inner crisis; but even the public react to it by their more or less admitted distaste for big fat books, claiming that modern life doesn’t provide the time; by their distaste for the thin substance of the imagined life, which they compare with thronged reality; and against the naïve self-satisfaction of narrators who set themselves down cosily like nannies while the children have long since lost the patience and credulity of their grandparents. I don’t in the least claim that all these phenomena of rejection have found the right formula, but they provide evidence that the epic has today become extremely problematic. And the mythological no less so. In gardens the little gnomes put there by our grand- parents still stand with sword and bow, but they strike us as odd, like abandoned toys. Thanks to research, our age knows the myths much better than they were known earlier, but it treats them as pretty prehistorical shards that belong in a museum. No thought given that, from these countless remains of human dreaming overwhelmed and shattered by the awakening of Thought, perhaps a new whole might be made, that something new might be set in train. Particular myths may point to intriguing memories, but overall we seem to believe that they belong to a stage of consciousness long left behind. Nothing is so indicative of the state of our consciousness as the split of its predilections between music and prose. While poetry concentrates on becoming ever more prose-like, and uses the old magical means only in the pill-form of the lyric, the need for magic, rapture, great phrases and religious motivations has built itself up into the cloud-castle of music. This spiritual double existence that we lead, between an un-lyrical state and a too- lyrical state no longer bound to the truth of reality, is one of the reasons why art today seems so artificial and life so mechanical, and so neither is felt to relate to the full human soul. But if this is our state, then maybe the need for myth is over, but certainly not the need for the epic – in the lost sense of the raising of Life into what can be sung; rather it has merely been shunted aside, or neglected, and in short not many questions are as important for literature as this: how can one restore to it the intoxication, the gods, the verse, the larger-than-life without plaster monumentality and without artificially darkening the brightness our spirit has achieved. In a word, the novel has so fundamentally subdued the epic that at the peak of its development already a need can be discerned for a counter-movement – which is not at all the same as a reversal. And so it is neither caprice nor chance, but extraordinarily revealing of Döblin’s nervous intensity, that he is the first to ride this counter-movement, and with no caveats. There are probably other means of staying closer to today’s narrative forms, but it is the boldest move, and one requiring the most radical commitment,

52 to simply go back to earlier verse narratives in order to make that ancient holy turtle move at today’s pace. You can’t say he gets away with it lightly – pious preservers and aficionados of the strict heavenly forms will cover their heads in horror – but it happens with a marvellous relentlessness that has great pulling power in even the smallest details. The lines of this verse-novel are better seen as rhythmically broken images. ‘Jag Newas the island. – The Maharajah’s palace. – Pillared halls, domes, galleries. – The old king was not asleep. – He sat beneath a tamarind. From across the pool the water-ouzel sang.’ If you study this quite simple example, you see that it is neither free rhythm nor rhythmic prose, but quite ordinary prose that apart from punctuation uses line breaks as the organising means, and in such a way that each line grasps and separates the image or group of related images in a shorter or longer breath-unit. The phrasing is layered over the weaker one of punctuation; this of course is true of every other kind of verse, but there it is more or less bound into a scheme, whereas here the intellectual inhibition and restraint that always makes itself felt in any long piece of writing falls completely away, and the expression follows only the dictates of spiritual and imaginative needs. Such verse can descend to the level of the diary entry, where notes are juxtaposed without syntax; but it can also rise dramatically in the most natural way to give a language of sobs, of agitation, of children, and at its highest a quite manically elevated language. […] [He also uses] other means of heightening. The most obvious – in a sense encompassing all the others – is varied repetition. Assonances and alliteration like ‘ripplerustlerush’, ‘cooing tugtwitch’, or ‘tumbled in dreadful clouds, whirled in tumbling clouds’ are interspersed with direct repetitions that increase the psychological weight, like ‘You shall feel your blood and blood’ or ‘no way and nohow, and never and at no point’; sometimes the narrative is full of ‘ands’, and through this slowing down attains the tempo of a chain dragged across ground. Sometimes four mountains to be climbed are expressed by naming four mountains one behind the other, unprocessed, exactly as they stand there in reality for the despairing eye. Sometimes these repetitions have the obstinacy of an unshakeable idea; sometimes whole sections reappear, always cut in a different way as in a film or a musical Leitmotif. Sometimes the same line appears in the most different settings, unexpected, wayward, so that it no longer seems like a work of European art, but the song of a madman drumming words onto his skull, or the religious rapture of a cannibal. This is not always in the best of taste, but such abused and dragged-along language is closer to the inner proceedings than a beautifully powdered skin. Even the many onomatopoeic expressions that are used are not always tasteful; this direct painting- with-sounds is in its weaker moments somewhat like that of a very lively adult telling children an exciting story (pelle pelle, sighsough, ei-eiah, girre girre, etc.) But in the stronger places it is just like when, in a state of great urgency, our thoughts become illusions and words take on bodies. Hallucinations are not tasteful, but they are states of extreme intensity!

53

And here, I believe, we may recall that the mysterious correspondence between sound-picture and designated object belongs to the primal magic of speech, just as the influence of the breath-cycle and the mystery of varied repetition belong to rhythm and rhyme. For, as an aside, we attend too much to assonance and balance here; its effect rests just as much on the dissimilar, the only roughly corresponding, on the un- identical but merely analogous acoustic repetition in remarkable accordance with its context. The content of the analogy, the comparison, the identification of only partly similar images are the principal tools of pictorial, poetical thought, in contrast to the exact thought of Knowledge. In our good verse, all of that has already eroded away, but what Döblin writes is a kind of primal verse, raw and passionate, with a quite unstable constant mixing and unmixing, again as if for the first time conjured up from the framework of prose. This achievement is as bold as it is successful, as extraordinary as it is surprising. And therein lies the problem of this book, and for those who don’t let themselves be convinced, the problematic. All the rest will hardly find any resistance. The realism with which humans, super- and sub-humans, gods, the dead, demons, real and unreal events are described is as exact as an observation and as cruel as the fact that all flesh carries within it the ribs of death. Against and over one another these pitiless descriptions, the lyrical beauty of which are Döblin’s surprise, pile up to a wildly decorated tower. The events, sometimes designed for a youthful yearning for adventure, are even in such places as if a giant is rummaging in a child’s box of building bricks. In other places, thanks to Döblin’s extraordinary felicity in feeling his way into alien fantastical cultural milieus, they become great pictures and stylisations. In not a few places they become mighty mythically unfettered depictions, which in the more peaceful light of a novel and its closer ties to the present would not be at all possible. In such parts the book enriches our literature in respect not of some detail, but of an entire region. I shall point to just one example to illustrate this: the descriptions of the god Shiva. It is hard to depict a god, especially one with a big belly, plump cheeks, fat-smeared face, snakes in the hair, three eyes, four arms and so on, so that our missionaries call him a disgusting idol. Nevertheless he – the Blue-throated, the Flower-footed – is the World-shaker through love; around him wafts warmth, mountains bulge under him like soft pelts, snowfields melt when he steps on them, and Döblin succeeds in making of this paradoxically mixed god-being an actual god, one of whom his entourage speaks with sweetness, of ‘him for whose sake one lives’. I don’t know what influence this book will attain or whether the resistance it will certainly not be spared can be overcome. So I prefer not to trumpet out that here something has been created that should have great influence on the development of our literature. But even when I think it over coolly, I am confident in declaring that this work should have the greatest influence! END

54

2. Oskar Loerke, Excerpt from ‘To Alfred Döblin on his 50th Birthday 46 […] The enormous poem Manas sings the Ego of the human being over Nature. This is Myth: from the very first word we are rocked in the wingbeat of a mythic tempo: Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down From the eastern iceheads of Himalaya. The basic course of events in Manas - for all the overflowing profusion of invention in its scenes, characters, profound character traits of gods, demons, people, animals – is of an overwhelming simplicity. As Chaos rages in the form of the most passionate, the wildest powers of Nature, the age-old lucid order of the world emerges in accordance with the great law. It is called: Universal Sorrow, bestowed and overcome through Universal Recognition; it is called Love, Life, and Death blazing in Faith and through Power of Action. These primal concepts offer their own primal profundity. They embrace every fate with Fate; beneath the appearances of the forest of delusion they glue Being. Döblin’s greatness lies in attempting to seek the measure of the immeasurable. He sings the power of the Soul, which in its human shell becomes All-powerful. Sorrow and Love and their complements – knowledge and fulfilment – in his heroes become such unbounded energies that the limits of the body weaken and let in the devastation of adversaries and counteractions in the service of the Cosmic. With this he created a gripping fable. War-chief Manas, surrounded by all the joy and glory of an Indian prince, has returned home victorious in battle, and is supposed to join in the celebrations. But as rain streams down he stands at the window of his garden hall, and, looking inward, sees slipping away the soul of the enemy he has slain. He senses a rending sorrow: The one I struck is me myself. Such momentous questions have arisen in him that he refuses food, cannot see the sun, and beneath his feet the ground heaves like a sea, rages like a fire. What is life? What is death? What is a soul? – All existence flows together in him in the common reality of Sorrow. And so he has to experience this reality to the utmost, in order to know it. Where do souls continue on after they have slipped away from life, to suffer their disembodied, naked, perfect sorrow? In the Field of the Dead on the slopes of the Himalaya! His mentor Puto, a wise yogi, has to take him there. And the flocking souls, helpless billows of mist in the mountain storm, suckle on him, on the living man, in order that their now- unchanging fate can re-enter time. He allows himself great torments, and endures what people before him and around him have endured, in his power of suffering scarcely an individual any more, but almost Humanity itself. Then, overwhelmed by torments, he loses consciousness. Three malevolent demons, Chanda, Munda, Nishumbha, creep into his body. Puto believes that his pupil is dead, and means to defeat the demons who have

46 From Alfred Döblin Im Buch – zu Hause – auf der Strasse, Berlin 1928. It was Loerke who unreservedly recommended to Samuel Fischer the publication of Manas.

55 taken up lodging in his husk. But he kills Manas, and the demons escape. The body is carried back to Manas’ home town, Udaipur, and burned. But Savitri, Manas’ favourite wife, does not believe her beloved is dead. The burned body is a false Manas – Manas was her life, and she still lives. She sets off for the Field of the Dead, overcomes enormous dangers and terrors in the magical certainty of her longing for Manas, and by coupling with him brings about his rebirth. They no longer need each other as physical partners, for like Manas as a man, Savitri as a woman has broken through the bounds of the individual and grown into the embodiment of Humanity. They live in each other, and are able to relinquish the state of the extinguishing of the senses, the sense of an independent, ongoing Nature, which they have achieved. Savitri becomes the goddess she was before she came down to Earth, and stays in Heaven; on Earth Manas lives on, a Superman freed by ultimate knowledge – a Super-god. For Hindu Gods are but lords of the transient phantasmagoric world, whereas Manas has experienced the synthesis of these phantasmagorias. They exercise power case by case: he is the enduring Power. The contradiction of active and passive is lifted from him in the music of his existence: music is immediate reality, gods merely likenesses of this music. For this he subdues the three demons, chases others away, defeats Ganesha and even Shiva… As for his fellow humans, he tries to shake them up: even in life they are no more than Souls on the Field of the Dead, there is no difference between here and there. He directs his anger at the comfortable, at slaves, prisoners. His joy greets the solitary perceptive poet. Can one see the height of the spiritual drop in these events, the Faustian in the passions at work? If you erase all the exposition, you have the barest outline: quest – death – rebirth – return of Manas; quest – rescue – apotheosis of Savitri. Döblin leads us along the distant path from home to the ends of the world, the path from here and now to the hellish and heavenly Beyond. And he relates the adventures that occur on this journey. This conception is of a kind with the main poetical traditions of every culture. They tolerate no legerdemain in the linking and weaving together of events, no outlandish ambushes by Fate, no calculated tensions of motive which are meant to drive the characters to strut proudly and prove themselves. Every action is explicit and credible. There is, it seems, no expectation that a spectator will come and watch, perhaps even seek thereby to solve his problems. But it happens that someone is buffeted or driven to seek out everything that has become scattered, to venture the whole path, to experience it all. In so doing, though remaining human, he grows into a giant, to a model of humanity. Manas sets out in search of Sorrow, and by the end has experienced the universe, which however far it may extend is still part of the body of his Soul. […] END

56

3. Axel Eggebrecht, Die litararische Welt 3/24 (1927) Sixteen months ago I published here remarks about a conversation with Alfred Döblin on the topic of his coming epic Manas. Now I read that report again, and am struck by the exactness and acuity with which the writer spoke then of the work he had just started, and outlined for me the course of the plot. […] The total clarity with which Döblin saw his way ahead from the start seems to me worth mentioning. In our completely pragmatic age concerned only with mundane problems, this great work can all too easily fall into the danger of being written off as a mere play of the imagination, as ‘useless’ metaphysical caprice. […] This book does not make it easy on the reader. […] Even those who dig readily into it can easily become lost in the unreal, boundless, uncontrolled world of spirits and demons created by the writer, until it becomes too much. […] The story of the battles of the superman Manas when he penetrates the realm of the dead, is beaten, is reborn, and is finally victorious over Shiva, is in the end nothing but the hymn of the cosmic anarchist Döblin to the magnificent independence and unbounded autonomy of the human spirit. Traditional myth is exploded to create the new myth of our unmythical time. It is the most radical representation imaginable of the victory of the conscious human soul over the unconscious soul of Nature. […] Again we stand astonished, as with Mountains Oceans Giants, at the inexhaustible power and breadth of this brain. Even more moving are the inward sweetness of the most tender trifles, the diversions into fairy tales, dreamily sure views of landscapes and souls with which this immense colourful bulky web of absolute phantasy is shot through. In it there are little sagas, Indian, maybe retold but in the retelling wonderfully renewed; amid this opulence of a conscious phantasizing intelligence are sections full of unparalleled surrender to landscapes, deserts, mountains and seas. And it ends in such jubilant wild triumph over the narrow sense-bound world that even the sober reader is pulled along and at last understands that he could not arrive here except by way of unbodied space, an untrodden never-to-be-trodden Beyond, the autonomous world of fantasy far from all purposes and all causal and material laws. […]

57

4. W. von Einsiedel, Die schöne Literatur, 29 (1928) What fascinates about Döblin again and again and to some extent demands our respect is his fantastical urge for the outsized and the obsessiveness of his cerebral imagination – which at first glance lends this work too the sense of the unusual. Nevertheless it is precisely here that Döblin, aiming for the highest and seeking to expand from the realm of the elemental into the spiritual, reveals more clearly than in most other works the poverty of his actual creative powers. At one point in the book he pronounces his own verdict: “Believe me, music is true.” In this sense Manas is not true insofar as it is not music but rather its opposite. Of course not in the sense that he fails to let the reader glide along on the riskless waves of a calm and peaceful river of verse; rather that he does not allow us to detect that mysterious streaming power that lifts up and overwhelms, and whose purest and most direct expression is music. In the jolting jerking twitching sentences of his language lie exposed the essence of Döblin’s artistry: it is cramp and hysteria, always needing to be forced. I hear a curiously thin voice that would like to scream but does not have the breath. And which therefore strives to lift itself supported by the noise of deafening instruments. It would no doubt be worthwhile to analyse Döblin’s style of composition. In so doing you would find how artificial are the means by which he must create his atmosphere; how transparent for example is the suggestive intent with which exotic names are deployed. Then you finally get to the bottom of how the whole enormous mythological apparatus of gods and demons had to be summoned up in order to disguise the emotional and spiritual emptiness of the book. Hardly a place that really moves us. Everything remains external. It is often asserted that the characters are suffering. We do not suffer with them, remain cold and uninvolved and at last grow tired of the monotonous flickering. Döblin seems to me at his truest and most characteristic in the bizarre and fantastical scenes with the three demons. We may find here and there steps towards greatness in vision and ideas – they choke in the harsh whirling desert of external incidents. Manas is no epic poem in a new form, but a magical feature film for intellectuals. Any deeper meaning is a mirage.

END

58